Thus an encroachment, which had failed in Africa, succeeded through a conjuncture of circumstances, especially the intervention of the civil power, in Gaul. Of course it was made the stepping-stone to further advances. This one specimen may give us a notion how the lawful power of the Patriarch and the recognised pre-eminence of the one Apostolic See of the West had a continual tendency to develop, and won, by degrees, unlimited control over the original and acknowledged rights of the Bishops and Metropolitans. Still, even in the hands of St. Leo, this was merely an extraordinary interference. Ravennius, the successor of this very St. Hilary, was elected and consecrated by the Bishops of his province, who then announced it to Pope Leo, and received a congratulatory answer.[68] He says himself to the Bishops of the province of Vienne, "It is not for ourselves that we defend the ordinations of your provinces, which perhaps Hilarius may, according to his wont, falsely state to you, to render disaffected the mind of your Holiness; but it is for you we claim them through our solicitude." And again: "Decreeing this, that if any one of our brethren in any province die, he who is known to be the Metropolitan of that province, should claim to himself the ordination of the Priest."[69] So long as the election and consecration of Bishops and Metropolitans were thus free and canonical, the greatness of the central See could never depress and extinguish the essential equality of the Episcopate. Let it be remembered that St. Leo, with all his power and influence, consecrated no other Bishops than those of Southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, which were the bounds of his proper patriarchate; there his authority was direct and immediate; but in Africa, the Gauls, Spain, Illyricum, and the West generally, it was only properly exercised in matters beyond the range of the Bishops and Metropolitans. We suppose it is impossible to define a power which was to correct and restore in emergencies. The Bishops of the province of Aries afterwards besought Pope Leo to restore the primacy to Arles, and render, A.D. 450, this undoubted testimony to the Primacy of the Roman Church, and to the connexion between the rights of the Metropolitan and the Patriarch:--