appearance of a sacred office, nor we lose by little the freedom which our Lord Jesus Christ, the deliverer of all men, has given us by His own blood. The Holy and Ecumenical Synod has therefore decreed, that the rights which have heretofore, and from the beginning, belonged to each province, shall be preserved to it pure and without restraint, according to the custom which has prevailed of old, each metropolitan having permission to take a copy of the things now transacted for his own security. But if any one shall introduce any regulation contrary to what has been now defined, the whole Holy and Ecumenical synod has decreed that it shall be of no effect."[63] It must be allowed that De Maistre has very good reasons for disliking General Councils. Nine years after this Council, St. Leo the Great became Pope, whose long and able Pontificate will afford us the best means of judging what the legitimate power of the Roman See was, and how it tended to the preservation and unity of the whole Church. He lived at an important crisis, when the barbarous tribes of the North were about to burst over the Empire and the Church; the system of which, had it not been consolidated by himself, his immediate predecessors and successors, might have been dissolved and broken up into fragments. I will first show, by a few quotations, that St. Leo had no slight sense of his own duty and dignity among his brother Bishops. We will then see how his actions, and the way in which they were received by others, supported his words.