ready by any obsequious act to get on their side the bishop of the capital, who dispenses the smiles of the emperor. Against all primitive order that bishop is found to consecrate his subordinate patriarchs at Alexandria and Antioch: to put down one and to raise another. When his usurpation was fresh and still incomplete, the patriarch Theophilus could persecute St. Chrysostom for the wrong done to Alexandria; but the patriarch Cyrus, made for his subserviency to Heraclius and Sergius to sit in the seat of St. Athanasius, addresses Sergius as “My Lord,(62) the thrice-blessed Father of fathers, the ecumenical patriarch, Sergius, the least of his servants,” and his acts are as humble as his words. It is clear that the eastern patriarchal system had fallen from intrinsic corruption before the joint operation of Byzantine despotism and the ambition of the bishop of the capital, who bought every accession to his own power and influence by acting in ecclesiastical matters as the instrument of the imperial will. This fall was complete before the events which mark the last ten years of the reign of Heraclius as a time of unequalled and irretrievable disaster both to the Church and to the State. Yet something must still be added to portray that civil condition of the State which led on to this disaster. In all this time the city of the emperor’s residence had been exhausting of their wealth—by the terrible severity of the imperial taxation—the provinces subject to it. Egypt and Syria lived under a perpetual oppression no less than Italy and Rome. Every distinction, every favour, which Antioch, when Queen of the east, may have brought to Syria, had long migrated to the banks of the Bosphorus. All the national feeling of Egypt was aggrieved by the ruler who treated the dower of Cleopatra—the imperial gem of Augustus—as a storehouse to be plundered at pleasure. And the national spirit was intensified to fever heat by the hatred of Byzantium on the part of the Eutychean population, forming the vast majority in the whole country.