the priest whom he appointed and deposed, who was truly _Pontifex Maximus_ as well as _Pater Patriæ_. A Dante of the tenth or eleventh century might have found the highest Ghibelin ideal, the Augustus crowned by God, ruling in God’s name as God’s Vicar but knowing no father or lord on earth, in the mighty Emperors of that day, in the men who turned from the toils of the camp and the splendours of the court to tame their own bodies with the hardness of a hermit in his cave, in Nikêphoros seeking rest on his bearskin on the earth for the stalwart limbs that had smitten down the Saracen, in Basil with his girdle of iron on his loins, marching forth to trample under foot all that stood forth as either the foe of Christ or the foe of Rome. * * * * * Mighty and wonderful indeed are those the most brilliant days in the long annals of the Eastern Empire. Crete, Cyprus, Kilikia, won back from the misbelievers--the Roman eagle again spreading her wings over the Euphrates and the Tigris--the cross again planted in what might seem to be its special home at Antioch and Edessa--all show the part which the Eastern Rome in her proudest days could play in that Eternal Question which is in truth the very substance of her whole history. Seated at the junction of two worlds, called into being by her founder as the special guardian of Europe and of those lands of Asia which Europe had made her own, as soon as the strife of West and East had changed into a strife of Christendom and Islam, the Eastern Rome was bound to be the foremost in the strife, or she was untrue to the cause of her own being. The Roman of the East, like the Spaniard of the West, was of necessity a crusader before crusades were preached; with both of them religion and patriotism were in truth the same; men could not deal a blow on behalf of their country which was not also a blow dealt on behalf of their faith. We have already glanced at this greatest of all the many instances of Byzantine power of revival, the great days of the Macedonian Emperors. I call back your thoughts to them again in order to carry out more fully the contrast between the East fighting for its very being against the unbelieving foe, fighting under the leadership of its still present Imperial head, and the West where the Imperial head fell away from the common work of all, and left the leadership of the Empire and of the kingdoms of the West to the spiritual power which stood ready to do the highest of his duties for him. When the West first marched for the deliverance of the East, it was not at the bidding of the Cæsar, but at the bidding of the Pontiff. In earlier days, when the danger was at their own gates, when new Attilas came, year after year, on the old errand of havoc, Germany was indeed ready with men to do once more the work of Aetius and the first Theodoric. The Saxon kings, father and son, knew how to smite the Magyar with blows more crushing