What is a cardinal? In the early days of the Church in Rome the presbyters and deacons of the city, the council and administrators of its bishop, were considerable personages--indeed the bench of presbyters had always been of great importance in the government of the Church in Rome as elsewhere, as Jerome testifies, and the seven deacons were even more conspicuous partly perhaps, as Jerome suggests, because they were few and the presbyters were many, and partly because the diaconate appears very early in Roman Church annals, and may indeed have been a relic of the evangelisation of the eternal city by Peter, at whose instance "the seven" were first instituted (Acts vi. 3). To the presbyters and deacons must be added the rural bishops of the Roman district who came in time to assist the Pope at the great ecclesiastical solemnities, and are an example of those parochial oversights, no larger than parishes, over which we find "bishops" presiding at a time when--except in the great metropolitan Sees--bishops were little more than rural deans. [Illustration: SAINT PETER'S] As the Church grew these presbyters of the original "titles" or parish churches of Rome, together with the regional deacons of the city, and the suburban bishops, took rank as the cardinal or principal Roman clergy, and in time the privilege of forming part, even in only a titular sense, of this body of presbyters and deacons of the great See of Rome, was coveted by other than Romans, and the Pope would create the metropolitan of a foreign See or some distinguished foreign ecclesiastic cardinal priest or cardinal deacon of the Holy Roman Church. By the eleventh century the cardinals of the Roman Church are a recognised body, the Senate of the Pope, whose election is being gradually confined to their hands alone. In the next century the popular vote--the vote of the clergy and people of Rome--is altogether abolished, and thenceforth the election of a pope is exclusively vested in the College of Cardinals, whose privileges and dignity were further enhanced at the close of the thirteenth century by Boniface VIII.