iers wrote a book to prove
that he was Antichrist. The horrible bloodshed and murders attending
these quarrels in the great cities, and the private life of persons both
of high and low degree, clearly showed that Christianity, through its
union with politics, had fallen into such a state that it could no
longer control the passions of men. The biography of the sons of
Constantine is an awful relation of family murders. Religion had
disappeared, theology had come in its stead. Even theology had gone mad.
But in the midst of these disputes worldly interests were steadily kept
in view. At the Council of Ariminium, A.D. 359, an attempt was made to
have the lands belonging to the churches exempt from all taxation; to
his credit, the emperor steadfastly refused. Macedonius, the Bishop of
Constantinople, who had passed over the slaughtered bodies of three
thousand people to take possession of his episcopal throne, exceeded in
heresy even Arius himself, by not only asserting the inferiority of the
Son to the Father, but by absolutely denying the divinity of the Holy
Ghost.

[Sidenote: Two results of these events.]

As the fruits of these broils, two facts appear: 1st, that there is a
higher law, which the faithful may obey, in opposition to the law of the
land, when it suits their views; the law of God, as expounded by the
bishop, who can eternally punish the soul, must take precedence of the
law of Caesar, who can only kill the body and seize the goods; 2d, that
there is a supremacy in the Bishop of Rome, to whom Athanasius, the
leader of the orthodox, by twice visiting that city, submitted his
cause. The significance of these facts becomes conspicuous in later
ages. Things were evidently shaping themselves for a trial of strength
between the imperial and ecclesiastical powers, heretofore allied. They
were about to quarrel over their booty.

[Sidenote: History of Papal supremacy.]

We have now to consider this asserted supremacy of the Bishop of Rome,
and how it came to be established as a political fact. We must also turn
from the Oriental variations of opinion to those of the West. Except by
thus enlarging the field to be traversed, we can gain no perfect
conception of the general intellectual tendency.

[Sidenote: Hellenized Christianity.]

For long after its introduction to Western Europe, Christianity was
essentially a Greek religion. Its Oriental aspect had become Hellenized.
Its churches had, in the first instanc