Démidour in 1887, Mallet in 1889, and Bury also in 1889, have once more reviewed the evidence. The two first-mentioned go very fully into it, and sum up gallantly in Theodora’s favour; but Bury is not so sure. Gibbon, having duly warned us of Procopius’ malignity, proceeds slyly to tell some of the most printable of the indecent stories. Gibbon is seldom very far wrong in his judgments, and evidently had very little doubt in his own mind about Theodora’s guilt. Joseph Maccabe goes over it all again, and “regretfully” believes everything bad about her. Edward Foord says, in effect, that supposing the stories were all true, which he does not appear to believe, and that she had thrown her cap over the windmills when she was a girl--well, she more than made up for it all when she became Empress. After all, it depends upon how far we can believe Procopius; and that again depends upon how far we can bring ourselves to believe that an exceedingly pretty little Empress can once upon a time have been a _fille de joie_. That in its turn depends upon how far each individual man is susceptible to female beauty. If she had been a prostitute it makes her career as Empress almost miraculous; it is the most extraordinary instance on record of “living a thing down,” and speaks volumes for her charm and strength of personality. She lived in the midst of most furious theological strife. Christianity was still a comparatively new religion, even if we accept the traditional chronology of the early world; and in her time the experts had not yet settled what were its tenets. The only thing that was perfectly clear to each theological expert was that if you did not agree with his own particular belief you were eternally damned, and that it was his duty to put you out of your sin immediately by cutting your throat lest you should inveigle some other foolish fellows into the broad path that leadeth to destruction. Theodora was a Monophysite--that is to say, she believed that Christ had only one soul, whereas it was well known to the experts that He had two. Nothing could be too dreadful for the miscreants who believed otherwise. It was gleefully narrated how Nestorius, who had started the abominable doctrine of Monophysm, had his tongue eaten by worms--that is, died of cancer of the tongue; and it is not incredible that Procopius, who was a Synodist or Orthodox believer, may have invented the libels and secretly written them down in order to show the world of after days what sort of monster his heretical Empress really was, wear she never so many gorgeous ropes of pearls in her Imperial panoply. It is difficult to place any bounds to theological hatred--or to human credulity for that matter. The whole question of the nature of Christ was settled by the Sixth Œcumenical Council about a hundred and fifty years later, when it was finally decided that Christ had two natures, or souls, or wills--however we interpret the Greek word Φύσις--each