of the world to notice; as, indeed, the world was coming to cast in its lot with the rising religion, and, by submitting, to try to share its power. Paganism was being put down. And as the world was coming into, and lowering the discipline and the common standard of Christian practice, there was rising up, as a counterbalancing influence, as an attempt to realize that apostolic model of religion, which the Holy Scriptures set forththat severance from the world and union in religious strictness and retirement which we call Monachism. Christianity has mastered Paganism, and develops within itself a strict and holy rule, so that there is a world and a select religious body within itself. Coincidently with the Emperors becoming Christians, the seats of empire were removed to Constantinople and to Milan. Rome was left to the undivided influence, and gradually to the undivided rule, of the Bishop of the Church that 'sojourned there.'

II. The next half century, or little more, witnesses a revolution. The old empire, with its centuries of accumulated power, has fallen; whilst hordes of savage tribes overthrow and tread upon it. They build not up an empire for themselves, but prepare the way for the development of a principle of life and power which exists within the ancient and outgrown body; they break down that power which hinders it from manifesting itself. As the embryo out of the decaying seed, as the young out of the broken egg, so did the power of the Latin Church spring from the destruction of the Western Empire, -its life was manifested in the moral death and corruption of the Roman people. The contrast of Rome and Constantinople, throughout their history, shows that the destruction of the imperial power was the great means of developing the spiritual. And the bishops of Rome, as it were in the way of an anticipatory omen, showed their power on the first coming of the barbarians against the city. They overawed, and swayed, and turned back the conquerors. They saved Rome. They became the chief persons in Rome itself. They claimed authority in, if not over, the whole Church.

These sixty years include the period of the great controversies respecting the Incarnation, which shook the Eastern Church, and tended greatly to elevate the influence and authority of the see of Rome. The tone in which these subjects are treated here may be called impartial. We consider that it labours under one great fault. It does not enter into the views, and so cannot rightly appreciate the conduct, of those who believed that truth ought to be contended for--the truth on a point which is essential to the Christian faith. S. Cyril is treated with uniform unmitigated severity, and, as it were, with detestation.

On the other hand, S. Leo is evidently a character on whom the author delights to dwell. In him he sees no fault. There is a nobleness and greatness in his character which captivates the imagination of the poet, and draws out all his sympathies. He is one born to command, and to bow the will of others to his own. Dean Milman's character of him will be read with

interest:

"The Pontificate of Leo the Great is one of the epochs in the history of Latin, or rather of universal Christianity. Christendom, wherever mindful of its divine origin, and of its proper humanising and hallowing influence, might turn away in shame from these melancholy and disgraceful contests in the East. On the throne of Rome alone, of all the greater sees, did religion maintain its majesty, its sanctity, its piety; and, if it demanded undue deference, the world would not be inclined rigidly to question pretensions supported as well by such conscious power as by such singular and unimpeachable virtue; and by such inestimable benefits conferred on Rome, on the Empire, on civilization. Once Leo was supposed to have saved Rome from the most terrible of barbarian conquerors; a second time he mitigated the horrors of her fall, before the King of the Vandals. During his pontificate, Leo is the only great name in the Empire; it might almost seem in the Christian world. The Imperial Sovereignty might be said to have expired with Theodosius the Great. Women ruled in Ravenna and in Constantinople, and their more masculine abilities, even their virtues, reflected a deeper shame on the names of Theodosius II. and Valentinian III., the boy sovereigns of the East and West. Even after the death of Theodosius, Marcian reigned in the East, as the husband of Pulcheria. In the West the suspected fidelity impaired the power, as it lowered the character, of Aëtius; his inhuman murder deprived the empire of its last support; and the Count Boniface, the friend of Augustine, in his fatal revenge, opened Africa to the desolating Vandal. Leo stood equally alone and superior in the Christian world. Two years before the accession of Leo, Augustine had died. He had not lived to witness the capture and ruin of Hippo, his episcopal city. The fifth year after the accession of Leo, died Cyril of Alexandria; Nestorius survived, but ́in exile, his relentless rival. He was succeeded by Dioscorus, who seemed to have inherited all which was odious in Cyril, with far inferior polemic ability; afterwards an Eutychian heretic, and hardly to be acquitted of the murder of his rival, Flavianus. This future victim of the enmity of Dioscorus filled the see of Constantinople. Domnus, a name of no great distinction, was Patriarch of Antioch. In the West there are few, either ecclesiastics or others, who even aspire to a doubtful fame; such as Prosper, the poet of the Pelagian controversy, and Cassianus, the legislator of the Western monasteries."

'Leo, like most of his great predecessors and successors, was a Roman. He was early devoted to the service of the Church; and so high was the opinion of his abilities, that even as an acolyte he was sent to Africa with letters condemnatory of Pelagianism. By the great African prelates Aurelius and St. Augustine he was confirmed in his strong aversion to those doctrines, which might seem irreconcilable with his ardent piety. He urged upon Pope Sixtus the persecution of the unfortunate Julianus. When Leo was yet only a deacon, Cassianus dedicated to him his work on the Incarnation, At the decease of Pope Sixtus, Leo was absent on a civil mission, the importance of which shows the lofty estimate of his powers. It was no less than an attempt to reconcile the two rival generals, Aëtius and Albinus, whose fatal quarrel hazarded the dominion of Rome in Gaul.

There was no delay; all Rome, clergy, senate, people, by acclamation, raised the absent Leo to the vacant see. Leo disdained the customary hypocrisy of compelling the electors to force the dignity upon him. With the self-confidence of a commanding mind he assumed the office, in the pious assurance that God would give him strength to fulfil the arduous duties so imposed. Leo was a Roman in sentiment as in birth. All that survived of Rome, of her unbounded ambition, her inflexible perseverance, her dignity in defeat, her haughtiness of language, her belief in her own eternity, and her indefeasible title to universal dominion, her respect for traditionary and written law, and of unchangeable custom, might seem concentred in him alone. The union of the Churchman and the Roman is singularly displayed in his sermon on the day of St. Peter and St. Paul; their conjoint authority was that double title to obedience on which he built his claim to power, but chiefly as successor of St. Peter, for whom and for his ecclesiastical heirs he asserted a proto-Apostolic dignity. From Peter and through Peter all the other Apostles derived their power. No less did he assert the predestined perpetuity of Rome, who had only obtained her temporal autocracy to prepare the way, and as a guarantee, for her greater spiritual supremacy. St. Peter and St. Paul were the Romulus and Remus of Christian Rome. Pagan Rome had been the head of the heathen world; the empire of her divine religion was to transcend that of her worldly dominion. Her victories had subdued the earth and the sea, but she was to rule still more widely than she had by her wars, through the peaceful triumphs of her faith. It was because Rome was the capital of the world that the chief of the Apostles was chosen to be her teacher, in order that from the head of the world the light of truth might be revealed over all the earth.

"The haughtiness of the Roman might seem to predominate over the meekness of the Christian. Leo is indignant that slaves were promoted to the dignity of the sacerdotal office; not merely did he require the consent of the master, lest the Church should become a refuge for contumacious slaves, and the established rights of property be invaded, but the baseness of the slave brought discredit on the majesty of the priestly office.

Though Leo's magnificent vision of the universal dominion of Rome and of Christianity blended the indomitable ambition of the ancient Roman with the faith of the Christian, the world might seem rather darkening towards the ruin of both. Leo may be imagined as taking a calm and comprehensive survey of the arduous work in which he was engaged, the state of the various provinces over which he actually exercised, or aspired to, supremacy. In Rome heathenism appears, as a religion, extinct; but heretics, especially the most odious of all, the Manicheans, were in great numbers. In Rome, Leo ruled not merely with Apostolic authority, but took upon himself the whole Apostolic function. He was the first of the Roman Pontiffs whose popular sermons have come down to posterity. The Bishops of Constantinople seem to have been the great preachers of their city. Pulpit oratory was their recommendation to the see, and the great instrument of their power. Chrysostom was not the first, though the greatest, who had been summoned to that high dignity, for the fame of his eloquence. From the pulpit Nestorius had waged war against his adversaries. Leo, no doubt, felt his strength; he could cope with the minds of the people, and make the pulpit what the rostrum had been of old. His sermons singularly contrast with the florid, desultory, and often imaginative and impassioned style of the Greek preachers. They are brief, simple, severe; without fancy, without metaphysic subtlety, without passion: it is the Roman Censor animadverting with nervous majesty on the vices of the people; the Roman Prætor dictating the law,

and delivering with authority the doctrine of the faith. They are singularly Christian-Christian as dwelling almost exclusively on Christ, his birth, his passion, his resurrection; only polemic so far as called upon by the prevailing controversies to assert with especial emphasis the perfect deity and the perfect manhood of Christ. Either the practical mind of Leo disdained, or in Rome the age had not yet fully expanded the legendary and poetic religion, the worship of the Virgin and the Saints. St. Peter is not so much a sacred object of worship as the great ancestor from whom the Roman Pontiff has inherited supreme power. One martyr alone is commemorated, and that with nothing mythic or miraculous in the narrative-the Roman Laurentius, by whose death Rome is glorified, as Jerusalem by that of Stephen.'-Vol. i. pp. 178–182.

Again, after describing the condition of the Eastern Church during this period of controversy, and its subjection to the imperial authority, he says:

Leo seemed fully to comprehend the importance and the dignity of his position. He took the most zealous interest in the whole controversy, but his activity was grave, earnest, and serious. His language to the Eastern Emperors, and especially to the Princess Pulcheria, may sound too adulatory to modern ears. The divinity of the earthly sovereign was acknowledged in terms too nearly approaching that reserved for the great divine Sovereign. This, however, must be judged with some regard to the sentiments and expressions of the age; and his deference was in language rather than in thought. Leo addresses these earthly masters with an independence of opinion, more as their equal, almost more as their master, than would have been ventured by any other subject at that time in either empire.

In the West, meantime, Leo might seem, under the sole impulse of generous self-devotion, and reliance on the majesty of religion, to assume the noblest function of the civil power, the preservation of the Empire, of Italy, of Rome itself, of Christianity, from the most tremendous enemy which had ever threatened their freedom and peace. While the Emperor Valentinian III. took refuge in Rome, and rumours spread abroad of his meditated flight, abdication, abandonment of his throne, Leo almost alone stood fearless. An embassy, of which the Bishop of Rome was no doubt considered by the general reverence of his own age, as well as by posterity, as the head and chief, arrested the terrible Attila on the frontiers of Italy, and dispersed the host of savage and but half-human Huns. Leo, to grateful Rome, might appear as the peaceful Camillus, as the unarmed Marius, repelling invaders far more fearful than the Gauls or the Cimbrians.'. . . .

'The last struggles of Roman pride, which had rejected the demand of Attila for the hand of the Princess Honoria (his self-offered bride, whose strange adventures illustrate the degradation of the Imperial family), and which had been delayed by the obstinate resistance of Aquileia to the whole army of Attila, were crushed by the fall and utter extermination of that city, and the total subjugation of Italy as far as the banks of the Po. Valentinian, the Emperor, fled from Ravenna to Rome. To some no doubt he might appear to seek succour at the feet of the Roman Pontiff; but the abandonment of Italy was rumoured to be his last desperate determination. 'At this fearful crisis, the insatiable and victorious Hun seemed suddenly and unaccountably to pause in his career of triumph. He stood rebuked and subdued before a peaceful embassy, of which, with the greater part of the world, the Bishop of Rome, as he held the most conspicuous station, so he received almost all the honour. The names of the rich Consular Avienus, of the Prefect of Italy, Trigetius, who ventured with

Leo to confront the barbarian conqueror, were speedily forgotten; and Leo stands forth the sole preserver of Italy. On the shores of the Benacus the ambassadors encountered the fearful Attila. Overawed (as the belief was eagerly propagated, and as eagerly accepted) by the personal dignity, the venerable character, and by the religious majesty of Leo, Attila consented to receive the large dowry of the Princess Honoria, and to retire from Italy. The death of Attila in the following year, by the bursting of a blood-vessel, on the night during which he had wedded a new wife, may have been brooding, as it were, in his constitution, and somewhat subdued his fiercer energy of ambition. His army, in all probability, was weakened by its conquests, and by the uncongenial climate and unaccustomed luxuries of Italy. But religious awe may still have been the dominant feeling which enthralled the mind of Attila. The Hun, with the usual superstitiousness of the polytheist, may have trembled before the God of the stranger, whom nevertheless he did not worship. The best historian of the period relates that the fate of Alaric, who had survived so short a time the conquest of Rome, was known to Attila, and seemed to have made a profound impression upon him. The dauntless confidence and the venerable aspect of Leo would confirm this apprehension of encountering, as it were, in his sanctuary the God now adored by the Romans. Legend, indeed, has attributed the submission of Attila to a visible apparition of the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, who menaced the trembling heathen with a speedy divine judgment if he repelled the proposals of their successor. But this materialising view, though it may have heightened the beauty of Raffaelle's painting of Leo's meeting with Attila, by the introduction of preter-human forms, lowers the moral grandeur of the whole transaction. The simple faith in his God, which gave the Roman Pontiff courage to confront, and threw that commanding majesty over his words and actions which wrought upon the mind of the barbarian, is far more Christianly sublime than this unnecessarily-imagined miracle.'-Vol. i. pp. 213–216.

III. The next period carries us on from this great Pope to the time of his greater successor, Gregory I. Through a period of a century and a half, popes of very ordinary qualities occupied the see. Gelasius and Hormisdas are most prominent. During most of this time Italy was cccupied by Arian Ostrogoths, till these were overcome by the great general of Justinian. The Monophysite controversies raged in the East; and the influence of the Church was weakened by it. But the monotony of the papal history is relieved by some most interesting episodes: the conversion of the Teutonic races the legislation of Justinian-the monasticism of the West.

In treating the first of these subjects, the author draws out the national character, temper, and religion of the Teutonic races; and shows how these predisposed them for receiving Christianity in the form in which it was now presented to them, and qualified it when received. He says:

There might appear in the Teutonic religious character a depth, seriousness, and tendency to the mysterious, congenial to Christianity, which would prepare them to receive the Gospel. The Grecian polytheist was often driven into Christianity by the utter void in his religion, and by