"The fourth century brought important changes in the condition of the bishops of Rome. It is a singular trait of the corrupt Christianity of this period that the chief characteristic of the eminent prelates was a fierce and ungovernable pride. Humility had long ceased to be numbered among the Christian virtues. The four great rulers of the Church, Bishop of Rome, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, were engaged in a constant struggle for supremacy. Even the inferior bishops assumed a princely state, and surrounded themselves with their sacred courts. The vices of pride and arrogance descended to the lower orders of clergy; the emperor himself was declared to be inferior in dignity to the simple presbyter, and in all public entertainments and ceremonious assemblies the proudest layman was expected to take his place below the haughty churchman, As learning declined and the world sank into a new barbarism, the clergy elevated themselves into a ruling caste, and were looked upon as half divine by the rude Goths and the degraded Romans. It is even said that the pagan nations of the west transferred to the priest and monk the same awestruck reverence which they had been accustomed to pay to their Druid teachers. The Pope took the place of their Chief Druid, and was worshipped with idolatrous devotion; the meanest presbyter, however vicious and degraded, seemed, to the ignorant savages, a true messenger from the skies." There was no patriarch of Constantinople in the fourth century, and it was only in 330 that the city of Constantinople absorbed Byzantium. The bishop of Byzantium was not a patriarch, or even a metropolitan, but was a suffragan of the bishop of Heraclea. It was not till long after the fourth century that the bishop of Constantinople was recognized as patriarch, not, in fact, till the eighth general council. There was no struggle in the fourth nor in any subsequent century, for the supremacy, between Rome and Antioch, or Rome and Alexandria; neither the patriarch of Antioch nor the patriarch of Alexandria ever claimed the primacy; but both acknowledged that it belonged to the bishop of Rome, as do the schismatic churches of the East even now, though they take the liberty of disobeying their lawful superior. In the fifth Century, when St. Leo the Great was pope, the bishop of Constantinople claimed the _second_ rank, or the first _after_ the bishop of Rome, on the ground that Constantinople was the new Rome, the second capital of the empire. {89} St. Leo repulsed his claim, not in defence of his own rights, for it did not interfere with his supremacy, or primacy, as they said then, but in defence of the rights of the churches of Antioch and Alexandria. He also did it because the claim was urged on a false principle--that the authority of a bishop is derived from the civil importance of the city in which his see is established.