the very life of the Pope to his political schemes. He favoured the senate of Rome in its corporate capacity; he favoured individual senators, but always as instruments of his own absolute rule, the key to which was to unite the use of the Roman mind in administration with the Gothic arm in action. When the end of the schism came, he had married his only child Amalasunta, the heiress of his kingdom, to Eutharic, who in the first year of the emperor Justin was consul of Rome with that prince, and nominated by him. On what, then, did the Pope rely? On one thing only--that in the inmost conscience of the Church, in East and West, he was recognised as St. Peter's successor; that upon everyone who sat in the Apostolic See had descended the mighty inheritance, the charge which no man could execute except he were empowered by divine command and sustained by divine support. For as it required God to utter the words, "Upon this rock I will build My Church"; "If thou lovest Me, feed My sheep"; "Confirm thy brethren "; so it no less required God to enable any man to fulfil that charge. But how when it comes to a succession of men? How many families can show a continuous succession of three temporal rulers equally great? Can any family show four such? Can anyone calculate the power which maintains such a succession through centuries? Here, after four full centuries, in that one belief the seven next successors of St. Leo--Hilarus, Simplicius, Felix, Gelasius, Anastasius, Symmachus, and Hormisdas--stood as one man. Their counsels did not vary. Their resolve was one. Their course was straight. In Leo's time the earth reeled beneath the tread of Attila, the city groaned beneath Genseric's hoof. And now three heretics--despots, and ignoble despots, if ever such there were--filled the sole imperial throne. Arians, closely connected by family ties and identical interests, divided the West among them. The seven Popes sat on at the Lateran in the palace which Constantine had given them, and said Mass in the church which he had built for them. Three of his degenerate successors tried every art against them and failed. During twenty years of this time, from 476 to 496, no ruler small or great acknowledged the Catholic faith. The East was Eutychean, the West Arian. At length St. Remigius baptised the Frankish chief as first-born of the Teuton race in the Catholic faith of the Holy Trinity, and the Pope at Rome gave utterance as a father to his joy. The end was that the schism was terminated on the part of the bishop, the heir of the seat and the ambition of Acacius, by the prince, by his nobles, among them the legislator who was to be Justinian, and by 2500 bishops throughout the East, acknowledging in distinct terms that one unique authority on which the Popes had rested throughout the contest. They declared solemnly, in celebrating the holiest mystery of the Christian faith, that the word of