Popery prevailed amid all the contentions; and, A.D. 410, four bishops, deputed from Carthage, obtained an edict from the Emperor Honorius, which doomed to death every one who differed from the Catholic faith. From this edict serious persecutions arose. But, A.D. 451, the council of Chalcedon resolved, “that the same rights and honours conferred on the bishop of Rome, were due to the bishop of Constantinople,” confirming his jurisdiction, which he had before claimed, over all the provinces of Asia. Imperial dominion, however, was now declining, under a succession of feeble princes. At the opening of the _fifth_ century, Constantinople was the eastern capital, in which Arcadius presided as emperor, while Rome continued the western metropolis; though Honorius kept his court at Ravenna. Swarms of savage hordes, from the northern regions of Europe, under the names of Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, overran the richest provinces, sacking cities, and committing every species of barbarity and cruelty. Some of these barbarians had embraced the name of Christ from Arian teachers; and many of those bishops who held the true divinity of Christ were tortured, banished, or massacred with their people. Religion became still more corrupted; and public worship consisted chiefly in the performance of ceremonies, differing but little from those of the pagan Greeks and Romans. Both of them had a splendid ritual, gorgeous robes, tiaras, mitres, wax tapers, crosiers, processions, lustrations, images, and many such circumstances of pageantry, were to be seen equally in the heathen temples and in Christian churches. To engage the admiration of the ignorant population, pictures and statues of Christ, of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus in her arms, and of numerous saints, were set up in the churches, to be admired and worshipped. An invincible efficacy, in expelling evil spirits and healing diseases, was attributed to the presence of the bones of martyrs. The riches and magnificence of the churches exceeded all bounds; and the altars and the chests for the relics of saints were made of the richest materials, some of solid silver. Everything in the forms of the Catholic religion appeared to produce false ideas, or to excite the worst passions of the human heart. Hence superstition and intolerance, and dreadful persecution among the different parties. Mr. Gibbon states, of the party called Donatists, that “_three hundred_ bishops, with many thousands of the inferior clergy, were torn from their churches, stripped of their ecclesiastical possessions, banished to the islands, and proscribed by the laws, if they presumed to conceal themselves in the provinces of Africa.”