ive his judgment apart. An account of this
unsuccessful invitation was given in the council's second session of the
8th May. The western bishops still in the capital were invited to attend,
but several declined, because the Pope took no part. At the third session,
of the 9th May, after reading the former protocols, a confession of faith
entirely agreeing with the imperial document communicated four days before
was drawn up, and a special treatment of the Three Chapters ordered for
another day. At the fourth session, seventy-one heretical or offensive
propositions of Theodore of Mopsuestia were read and condemned. In the
fifth, the opposition made to him by St. Cyril and others was considered,
as well as the question whether it is allowable to anathematise after their
death men who have died in the Church's communion. This was affirmed
according to previous examples, and testimony from Augustine, Cyril, and
others. Theodoret's writings against Cyril were also anathematised. In the
sixth session, the same was done with the letter of Ibas. In the seventh
session, several documents sent by the emperor were read, specially letters
of Pope Vigilius up to 550, and a letter from the emperor Justin to his
prefect Hypatius, in 520, forbidding that a feast to Theodore or to
Theodoret should any longer be kept in the city of Cyrus. The imperial
commissioner informed the council, likewise, that the Pope had sent by the
sub-deacon Servusdei a letter to the emperor, which the emperor had not
received, and therefore not communicated to the council. The longer Latin
text of the acts also says that the emperor had commanded the Pope's name
to be erased from the diptychs, without prejudice, however, to communion
with the Apostolic See, which the council accepted. It held its last
sitting on the 2nd June, 553, and issued fourteen anathemas in accordance
with the thirteen of Justinian. There were then present 165 bishops.

The document brought to the emperor by the sub-deacon in the Pope's name,
but rejected, must be what has come down to us as the Constitution of the
14th May. It had the subscription of Vigilius, of sixteen bishops--nine
Italian, three Asiatic, two Illyrian, and two African--with three Roman
clergy. It decidedly rejected sixty propositions drawn from the writings of
Theodore; anathematised five errors as to the Person of Christ; forbade the
condemnation of Theodore's person, and of the two other Chapters. If this
document wa