mother of God. The
fathers, and even the guards, of the council were awed by this martial
array; the adversaries of Cyril and Mary were insulted in the streets,
or threatened in their houses; his eloquence and liberality made a daily
increase in the number of his adherents; and the Egyptian soon computed
that he might command the attendance and the voices of two hundred
bishops. [43] But the author of the twelve anathemas foresaw and dreaded
the opposition of John of Antioch, who, with a small, but respectable,
train of metropolitans and divines, was advancing by slow journeys
from the distant capital of the East. Impatient of a delay, which he
stigmatized as voluntary and culpable, [44] Cyril announced the opening
of the synod sixteen days after the festival of Pentecost. Nestorius,
who depended on the near approach of his Eastern friends, persisted,
like his predecessor Chrysostom, to disclaim the jurisdiction, and to
disobey the summons, of his enemies: they hastened his trial, and
his accuser presided in the seat of judgment. Sixty-eight bishops,
twenty-two of metropolitan rank, defended his cause by a modest and
temperate protest: they were excluded from the councils of their
brethren. Candidian, in the emperor's name, requested a delay of four
days; the profane magistrate was driven with outrage and insult from
the assembly of the saints. The whole of this momentous transaction was
crowded into the compass of a summer's day: the bishops delivered their
separate opinions; but the uniformity of style reveals the influence
or the hand of a master, who has been accused of corrupting the public
evidence of their acts and subscriptions. [45] Without a dissenting
voice, they recognized in the epistles of Cyril the Nicene creed and the
doctrine of the fathers: but the partial extracts from the letters and
homilies of Nestorius were interrupted by curses and anathemas: and the
heretic was degraded from his episcopal and ecclesiastical dignity.
The sentence, maliciously inscribed to the new Judas, was affixed and
proclaimed in the streets of Ephesus: the weary prelates, as they issued
from the church of the mother of God, were saluted as her champions;
and her victory was celebrated by the illuminations, the songs, and the
tumult of the night.

[Footnote 41: The origin and progress of the Nestorian controversy,
till the synod of Ephesus, may be found in Socrates, (l. vii. c. 32,)
Evagrius, (l. i. c. 1, 2,) Liberatus, (Brev