episcopi,
who voted in tynods, and conferred the minor orders, See Thomassin,
Discipline de l'Eglise, tom. i. p. 447, &c., and Chardon, Hist. des
Sacremens, tom. v. p. 395, &c. They do not appear till the fourth
century; and this equivocal character, which had excited the jealousy
of the prelates, was abolished before the end of the tenth, both in the
East and the West.]

I. The freedom of election subsisted long after the legal establishment
of Christianity; [88] and the subjects of Rome enjoyed in the church
the privilege which they had lost in the republic, of choosing the
magistrates whom they were bound to obey. As soon as a bishop had closed
his eyes, the metropolitan issued a commission to one of his suffragans
to administer the vacant see, and prepare, within a limited time, the
future election. The right of voting was vested in the inferior clergy,
who were best qualified to judge of the merit of the candidates; in
the senators or nobles of the city, all those who were distinguished
by their rank or property; and finally in the whole body of the people,
who, on the appointed day, flocked in multitudes from the most remote
parts of the diocese, [89] and sometimes silenced by their tumultuous
acclamations, the voice of reason and the laws of discipline. These
acclamations might accidentally fix on the head of the most deserving
competitor; of some ancient presbyter, some holy monk, or some layman,
conspicuous for his zeal and piety. But the episcopal chair was
solicited, especially in the great and opulent cities of the empire, as
a temporal rather than as a spiritual dignity. The interested views, the
selfish and angry passions, the arts of perfidy and dissimulation, the
secret corruption, the open and even bloody violence which had formerly
disgraced the freedom of election in the commonwealths of Greece and
Rome, too often influenced the choice of the successors of the apostles.
While one of the candidates boasted the honors of his family, a second
allured his judges by the delicacies of a plentiful table, and a third,
more guilty than his rivals, offered to share the plunder of the church
among the accomplices of his sacrilegious hopes [90] The civil as well
as ecclesiastical laws attempted to exclude the populace from this
solemn and important transaction. The canons of ancient discipline,
by requiring several episcopal qualifications, of age, station, &c.,
restrained, in some measure, the indiscriminate cap