In restoring schismatics to unity he was in general successful. He wrought such a union among the bishops of Africa that Donatism lost influence more and more, and finally disappeared. He dealt with the obstinate Milanese schism which had arisen out of the treatment of the Three Chapters. He won back a great part of the Istrians. He had more trouble with the two archbishops of Constantinople, John the Faster and Cyriacus; and his former friend the emperor Mauritius turned against him, so that he welcomed the accession of Phocas, as a deliverance of the Church from unjust domination. The unquestioning loyalty with which, as a civil subject, he welcomed this accession has been unfairly used against him. As first of all the civil dignitaries of the empire he could only accept what had been done at Constantinople. But in all his fourteen years neither the difficulty of circumstances nor the consideration of persons withheld him from carrying out his resolutions with a patience and a firmness only equalled by gentleness of manner. From beginning to end he considered himself, and acted, as set by God to watch over the maintenance of the canons, the discipline enacted by them, and so doing to perfect by his wisdom as well as to temper by his moderation the vast fabric of the Primacy as it had grown itself, and nurtured in its growth the original constitution of the Church during nearly six hundred years. We may now say a few words upon the Primacy itself as exerted by St. Leo at the Council of Chalcedon, and the Primacy as exerted by St. Gregory in the fourteen years from 590 to 604; also on the interval between them, and the relative position of the bishop of Constantinople to Leo in the person of Anatolius, and to Gregory in the person of John the Faster. We see at once that the intention which Leo discerned in Anatolius, which he sternly reprehended and summarily overthrew, has been fully carried out by John the Faster, who, in documents sent to the Pope himself for revision, as superior, terms himself ecumenical patriarch. Who had made him first a patriarch and then ecumenical? The emperor alone. He is so called in the laws of Justinian. The 140 years from Leo to Gregory are filled with the continued rise of the Bishop of Nova Roma under the absolute power of the emperor. He has succeeded not only in taking precedence of the legitimate patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch; he has more than once stripped of their rights the metropolitans and bishops subject to the great see of the East, and himself consecrated at Constantinople a patriarch of Antioch by order of the emperor of the day. This Acacius did, humbly begging the Pope's pardon for such a transgression of the due order and hierarchy, and repeating the offence against the Nicene order and constitution on the first opportunity. In the same way he has interfered with the elections at Alexandria. We learn from the instruction given by Pope Hormisdas to his