father for his children, seeing with spiritual eyes how we are
perishing in the prevarication of our father Acacius, delay not, sleep not,
but hasten to deliver us, since not in binding only but in loosing those
long bound the power has been given to thee; for you know the mind of
Christ who are daily taught by your sacred teacher Peter to feed Christ's
sheep entrusted to you through the whole habitable world, collected not by
force, but by choice, and with the great doctor Paul cry to us your
subjects 'not because we exercise dominion over your faith, but we are
helpers in your joy'. 'Hasten then to help that east from which the Saviour
sent to you the two great lights of day, Peter and Paul, to illuminate the
whole world.'" They call upon him as the true physician; they disclose to
him the ulcerous sores with which the whole body of the eastern Church is
covered; and they finish by directing to him a confession of faith,
rejecting the two opposite heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches. They remind
him of the holy Pope Leo, now among the saints, and conjure him to save
them now in their souls as Leo saved bodies from Attila.

But yet it was not given to Pope Symmachus to put an end to this confusion.
He sat during fifteen years and eight months, dying on the 9th July, 514.
The schism raised by the Greek emperor was at an end; and seven days after
his decease the deacon Hormisdas was elected with the full consent of all.
In the meantime the state of the East had gone on from bad to worse.
Anastasius, by writing and by oath, had pledged himself at his coronation
to maintain the Catholic faith and the Council of Chalcedon. Instead he had
persecuted Catholics, banished their bishops, by his falsehood and tyranny
sown discord everywhere. At last one of his own generals, Vitalian, rose
against him. After a long silence he once more betook himself to the Pope.
In January, 518, he wrote to the new Pope, Hormisdas, "that the opinion
spread abroad of his goodness led him to apply to his fatherly affection to
ask of him the offices which our God and Saviour taught the holy Apostles
by mouth, and especially St. Peter, whom He made the strength[94] of His
Church". He asked, therefore, "his apostolate by holding a council to
become a mediator by whom unity might be restored to the churches," and
proposed that a general council should be held at Heraclea, the old
metropolis of Thrace.

Hormisdas, after maturely considering the whole stat