From the accession of St. Athanasius to the See of Alexandria in 328 to the placing Cyrus in that See by Heraclius in 628, exactly three centuries elapse. In this time the great revolution begun by Constantine, when he took for his counsellor the court-bishop Eusebius, has full space to work itself out. His own son, Constantius, “patron of the Arian heresy,” in St. Jerome’s words, inaugurates in full force the attempt of the Byzantine monarchs to extend their temporal power over the spiritual. Valens so persecutes the eastern Church that when Theodosius is called in to save the empire, he finds the eastern episcopate in the state of ruin described by St. Basil. Unfortunately, he saw no better means of restoring it, when, in 381, he invited the bishops of his empire to anxious deliberation, than by laying the first stone of the Byzantine bishop’s exaltation. An eastern Council, at his prompting, strives to make that bishop the second bishop of the whole Church on a false foundation, because Constantinople is Nova Roma. Every Byzantine monarch adds his stone to the Byzantine bishop’s pillar of pride. St. Leo exposes and censures the assumption. Pope Gelasius does not reckon him among the patriarchs. Justinian enacts him to be ecumenical patriarch, which St. Gregory pronounces to be a title of diabolical pride: being, in fact, the building of spiritual power on temporal lordship. In thirty years after St. Gregory, the act of pride denounced by him receives its full interpretation. The patriarch Sergius attempts to mould the doctrine of the Church under the authority of Constantine’s successor: and Constantine’s empire is cut in half by the chalif of the man who claims all temporal power on the pretence that he has been invested by God with spiritual power. And two conflicting heresies, the Nestorian and Eutychean, the latter making its last development in the Monothelite, have severed the eastern empire into rivalities so bitter, that the Christians of the several parties hate each other more than they hate the new Mohammedan pretender. The episcopate, seen in all its glory and grandeur when first assembled by Constantine in 325, sinks ingloriously under the successors, in Alexandria and Antioch, of the very prelates who maintained the faith at Nicæa: sinks before Mohammed, who is seen to complete the work of Arius. The successor of St. Peter has done his utmost during two hundred years to preserve the eastern sees of Peter: and in them the whole ecclesiastical constitution formed for herself by the Church in the ten generations preceding Constantine: but Alexandria and Antioch have no prerogative of infallibility: they perish by their own folly: heresy pollutes their sees for generations, and at last the false prophet’s chalif alternately blights them with the favour which he shows to their heresy, or wastes them with the oppression which he has always ready for the faith. As to the great eastern