The practical division of the Roman empire in the fourth century, ensuing upon the act of Constantine in forming a new capital of that empire in the East, made the Church no longer subject to one temporal government. The same act tested the spiritual Primacy of the Church. It called it forth to a larger and more complicated action. I have in a former volume followed at considerable length the series of events the issue of which was, after Arian heretics had played upon eastern jealousy and tyrannical emperors during fifty years, to strengthen the action of the Primacy. But assuredly had that Primacy been artificial, or made by man, the division of interests ensuing upon the political disjunction of the East and West would have destroyed it. Julius and Liberius and Damasus would not have stood against Constantius and Valens if the heart of the Church had not throbbed in the Roman Primacy. Still more apparent does this become in the next fifty years, wherein the overthrow of the western empire begins. Then the sons of Theodosius, instead of joining hand with hand and heart with heart against the forces of barbarism, which their father had controlled and wielded, were seduced by their ministers into antagonism with each other. Byzantium worked woe to the elder sister of whom she was jealous. Under the infamous treasons of Rufinus and Eutropius, the words might have been uttered with even fuller truth than in their original application-- "Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit". Thus Alaric first took Rome. But he did not take the Primacy. Pope Innocent lost no particle of his dignity or influence by the violation of Rome's secular dignity. It was only seven years after that event when St. Augustine and the two great African Councils acknowledged his Principate in the amplest terms. The heresy of Pelagius and the schism of Donatus were stronger than the sword of Alaric. And only a few years later, when a most fearful heresy, broached by the Byzantine bishop, led to the assembly in which then for the first time the Church met in general Council since Nicaea, the most emphatic acknowledgment of the Primacy as seated in the Roman bishop by descent from Peter was given by bishops, the subjects of an emperor very jealous of the West, to a Pope who could not live securely in Rome itself. In all these hundred years it is seen how the division of the empire enlarged and strengthened the action of the Primacy. But this it did because the Primacy was divine. The events just referred to, but described elsewhere at length, would have destroyed it had it not been divine.