under a new name, it again took the form of a religious controversy.
Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, died in the last reign; and as he had
succeeded his uncle, so on his death the bishopric fell to Dioscorus,
a relation of his own, a man of equal religious violence and of less
learning, who differed from him only in the points of doctrine about
which he should quarrel with his fellow-Christians. About the same
time Eutyches, a priest of Constantinople, had been condemned by his
superiors and expelled from the Church for denying the two natures of
Christ, and for maintaining that he was truly God, and in no respect
a man. This was the opinion of the Egyptian church, and therefore
Dioscorus, the Bishop of Alexandria, who had no right whatever to meddle
in the quarrels at Constantinople, yet, acting on the forgotten rule
that each bishop's power extended over all Christendom, undertook of
his own authority to absolve Eutyches from his excommunication, and in
return to excommunicate the Bishop of Constantinople who had condemned
him. To settle this quarrel, a general council was summoned at
Chalcedon; and there six hundred and thirty-two bishops met and
condemned the faith of Eutyches, and further explained the Nicene creed,
to which Eutyches and the Egyptians always appealed. They excommunicated
Eutyches and his patron Dioscorus, who were banished by the emperor; and
they elected Proterius to the then vacant bishopric of Alexandria.

In thus condemning the faith of Eutyches, the Greeks were
excommunicating the whole of Egypt. The Egyptian belief in the one
nature of Christ, which soon afterwards took the name of the Jacobite
faith from one of its popular supporters, might perhaps be distinguished
by the microscopic eye of the controversialist from the faith of
Eutyches; but they equally fell under the condemnation of the council of
Chalcedon. Egypt was no longer divided in its religious opinions. There
had been a party who, though Egyptian in blood, held the Arian and
half-Arian opinions of the Greeks, but that party had ceased to exist.
Their religion had pulled one way and their political feelings another;
the latter were found the stronger, as being more closely rooted to the
soil; and their religious opinions had by this time fitted themselves
to the geographical boundaries of the country. Hence the decrees of
the council of Chalcedon were rejected by the whole of Egypt; and the
quarrel between the Chalcedonian and Ja