the reverence which in words he testified to the successor of St. Peter. In eighty-five years, from 553 to 638, the occupant of the eastern throne had advanced from holding a Council at Constantinople without the Pope’s consent, to presenting at Rome a doctrinal decree for his signature. A few years afterwards, when the Pope called a Council, and condemned the decrees of two emperors as heresy, and three successive bishops of Constantinople as the heretics who supported it, the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., tried the Pope as guilty of high treason before the Senate of Byzantium, and crowned him with martyrdom in exile. Step from Pope Vigilius a captive guarded at Constantinople in 553, to Pope Martin sentenced there as a traitor in 655, and dying in the Crimea a martyr. That step will mark the advance of eastern despotism and the peril of the Church’s independence. But it may be said that from the time Nestorius is deposed as guilty of heresy made by himself from the see of the capital in 431, to the publication of the imperial Ecthesis as a rule of faith in 638, the eastern patriarchates have been swaying backwards and forwards between the two opposing heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches: Syria is the parent of one: Egypt of the other. Through these two centuries the bishop of Byzantium has pursued under the emperor’s never-failing patronage a uniform course of self-aggrandisement. In this he was greatly helped by the extinction of the western emperor, when his master at Constantinople became the sole representative of the Roman name—that Christian king and Roman prince to whose honour so many Popes from Felix III. onward so vainly appealed. That very prince became step by step their most dangerous enemy. The first act immediately upon the extinction of the western emperor—who was the natural defender of the Holy See—was that a Byzantine bishop, Acacius, set himself up as the leader of the whole eastern episcopate. Pope Gelasius told the bishop of the day that he had no rank in the episcopate except that he was bishop of the capital: that a royal residence could not make an apostolic See. The new family of Justinian, ascending the eastern throne, was compelled by the internal state of the east, to acknowledge the Roman Primacy. Justinian never broke from that acknowledgment, but he termed his own bishop ecumenical patriarch in his laws: and every Byzantine bishop clung to the title given by an absolute sovereign. In the time of Pope Gregory the Great, a hundred years after the decree of Pope Gelasius, recording the pre-eminent rank and order of the three original Petrine Sees, of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, the Byzantine bishop is allowed to be a patriarch, Alexandria and Antioch have fallen under him. They themselves have been throughout all the intervening time the seats of violent party spirit, the spirit of the two conflicting heresies, striving for masterdom, disturbing succession in the sees, and