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the amplest terms. The heresy of Pelagius and the schism of Donatus were
stronger than the sword of Alaric. And only a few years later, when a most
fearful heresy, broached by the Byzantine bishop, led to the assembly in
which then for the first time the Church met in general Council since
Nicaea, the most emphatic acknowledgment of the Primacy as seated in the
Roman bishop by descent from Peter was given by bishops, the subjects of an
emperor very jealous of the West, to a Pope who could not live securely in
Rome itself.

In all these hundred years it is seen how the division of the empire
enlarged and strengthened the action of the Primacy. But this it did
because the Primacy was divine. The events just referred to, but described
elsewhere at length, would have destroyed it had it not been divine.

But this course of things, which is seen in action from the Nicene to the
Chalcedonic Council, comes out with yet stronger force from the moment when
Rome loses all temporal independence. We may place this moment at the date
of its capture by Genseric. But it continues from that time. The events
which took place at Rome in the twenty-one following years, the nine
sovereigns put up and deposed, the subjection to barbarous leaders of
hireling free-lances, the worse plundering of Ricimer seventeen years after
that of Genseric--these were events grieving to the heart St. Leo and his
successors; but yet not events at Rome alone--the whole condition of things
in East and West which Pope Simplicius had to look upon outside of his own
city, despotic emperors in the East, with bishops bending to their will,
allowing the apostolic hierarchy to be displaced, and the apostolic
doctrine determined by secular masters; Teuton settlements in the West
ruled by the heresy most inimical to the Church; the Catholic population
reduced in numbers and lowered in social position; whole countries seized
by pagans, and forced at once into barbarism and infidelity--in the midst
of all these the Pope stood: his generals were the several bishops of
captured cities, whose places were assaulted by heretical rivals, supported
by their kings. Gaul, Spain, Britain, Africa, Illyricum, Italy itself, no
longer parts of one government, but ruled by enemies, any or all of these
would have rejected the Roman Primacy if it had not come to them with the
strongest warrant both of the Church's past history and her present
consciousness.

Such was the new world in