“Religion in the sixth century became still more corrupt; it lay expiring,” as Dr. Mosheim remarks, “under an enormous heap of superstitious inventions. The worship of Christians was now paid to the remains of the true cross, to the images of the saints, and to bones, whose real owners were extremely dubious. The progress of vice among the clergy was truly shocking. In those very places which were consecrated to the advancement of piety, and the service of God, there was little else to be seen but ghostly ambition, insatiable avarice, pious frauds, intolerable pride, and a superstitious contempt of the natural rights of the people, with many other evils still more enormous.” Episcopal claims continued to be the subjects of constant disputes, especially between the patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople. John of Rome visited the eastern capital, A.D. 525, to serve his own purpose, but charged by Theodore, the Gothic king of Italy, to engage the emperor Justin to cease from persecuting the Arians. With a crowd of the nobility and clergy, the emperor met him, and bowed down to the very ground before the vicar of the blessed Peter, and coveting the honour of being crowned by him, received at his hands the imperial diadem! The patriarch invited the Pope to perform Divine service in the great church together with him; but he would neither accept the invitation, nor even see the patriarch, till he agreed not only to yield him the first place, but to seat him on a kind of throne above himself, alleging no other reason than _because he was the Roman High Priest_! The patriarch indulged him in every thing he required, and they celebrated Easter together, with extraordinary pomp and solemnity. The Pope officiated in the Latin tongue, according to the rites of the Latin church. Pre-eminence being thus acknowledged by the patriarch of Constantinople to the pontiff of Rome, it cannot be matter of wonder that Justinian, the nephew and successor of the emperor Justin, in his epistle to the new Pope, John II., writes, A.D. 533, “We hasten to SUBJECT _and to unite to your holiness all the priests of the whole East_. Nor do we suffer anything which belongs to the state of the church, however manifest and undoubted, that is agitated, to pass without the knowledge of your holiness, the _head of all_ the holy churches!” This pre-eminence was given more fully, two years after, in a memorial to the pontiff, by “the bishops and clergy of Constantinople.” It was addressed--“To our most holy lord, and most blessed father of fathers, Agapetus, archbishop of the Romans and patriarch, the bishops of the oriental diocese, and those who dwell in the holy places of Christ our Lord, with the residents and other classes assembled in this royal city.” Plain Christians may wonder at all this sacerdotal blasphemy, so utterly at variance with all that they read in the New Testament, except of the predicted Antichrist!