ain, I showed him confirming the doctrinal decrees of the Ecumenical
Council of Chalcedon, which followed the Council annulled by him, while he
reversed and disallowed certain canons which had been irregularly passed.
This he did because they were injurious to that constitution of the Church
which had come down from the Apostles to his own time. And this act of his,
also, I showed to be accepted by the bishop of Constantinople, who was
specially affected, and by the eastern emperor, and by the episcopate: and
also that the confirmation of doctrine on the one hand, and the rejection
of canons on the other, were equally accepted. I also showed this great
Council in its Synodical Letter to the Pope acknowledging spontaneously
that very position of the Pope which the Popes had always set forth as the
ground of all the authority which they claimed. The Council of Chalcedon
addressed St. Leo "as entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the
Vine". But the Vine in the universal language of the Fathers betokened the
whole Church of God. And the Council refers the confirmation of its acts to
the Pope in the same document in which it asserts that the guardianship of
the Vine was given to him by the Saviour Himself. This expression, "by the
Saviour Himself," means that it was not given to him by the decree of any
Council representing the Church. It is a full acknowledgment that the
promises made to Peter, and the Pastorship conferred upon him, descended to
his successor in the See of Rome. It is a full acknowledgment; for how else
was St. Leo entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine?
Those who so addressed him were equally bishops with himself; they equally
enjoyed the one indivisible episcopate, "of which a part is held by each
without division of the whole".[3] But this one, beside and beyond that,
was charged with the whole--the Vine itself. This one point is that in
which St. Peter went beyond his brethren, by the special gift and
appointment of the Saviour Himself. The words, then, of the Council contain
a special acknowledgment that the line of Popes after a succession of four
hundred years sat in the person of Leo on the seat of St. Peter, with St.
Peter's one sovereign prerogative.

It is requisite, I think, distinctly to point out that Christians, whoever
they are, provided only that they admit, as confessing belief in any one of
the three creeds, the Apostolic, the Nicene, or the Athanasian, they d