To Anatolius himself he says: "I grieve--that you attempt to infringe the most sacred constitutions of the Nicene Canons; as if this were a favourable opportunity presented to you, when the See of Alexandria may lose the privilege of the second rank, and the Church of Antioch its possession of the third dignity; so that when these places have been brought under your jurisdiction, all Metropolitan Bishops may be deprived of their proper honour."[104] "I oppose you, that with wiser purpose you may refrain from throwing into confusion the whole Church. Let not the rights of provincial Primacies be torn away, nor Metropolitan Bishops be deprived of their privileges in force from old time. Let no part of that dignity perish to the See of Alexandria, which it was thought worthy to obtain through the holy Evangelist Mark, the disciple of blessed Peter; nor, though Dioscorus falls through the obstinacy of his own impiety, let the splendour of so great a Church be obscured by another's disgrace. Let also the Church of Antioch, in which first, at the preaching of the blessed Apostle Peter, the name of Christian arose, remain in the order of its hereditary degree, and being placed in the third rank never sink below itself." So then it was not St. Peter's Primacy, nor his own proper authority in the Church, which St. Leo conceived to be attacked by this Canon; but he refused to be a party to "treading under foot the constitution of the Fathers"--to disturbing "the state of the universal Church, protected of old by a most wholesome and upright administration."[105] So the Emperor Marcian, Anatolius, Julian of Cos, beseech Leo to grant this, without so much as imagining that they are injuring _his_ rank by asking it. I see not how it is possible to avoid the conclusion, that the power of the First See, even as its most zealous occupant viewed it, was quite different from that power which was set up in the middle ages. This is only one of a vast number of proofs which distinguish the Primacy from the present Supremacy. And it is the more valuable, because St. Leo certainly carries his notion of his own rights as universal Primate further than any Father of his time. I shall have occasion to make a like remark presently in the matter of St. Gregory's protest.