bited in his
legislation, without regard to his conduct, we might, like the eastern
bishops, take these words as the motto of his reign and the key to his acts
as legislator. Indeed, it may be said that this legislation cannot be
understood except by presupposing throughout the cordiality of the alliance
between the Two Powers. In the election and the lives of bishops, in the
discipline of religious houses, in the strict observance of the celibate
life which has been assumed with full consent of the will by clergy and by
monks, the emperor is as strict in his laws as the Church in her canons.
The ruler of the State, who makes laws with a single word of his own mouth,
who commands all the armies of the State, who bestows all its offices, who
is, in truth, the autocrat, the impersonated commonwealth, shows not a
particle of jealousy towards the Church as Church. He enjoins the strict
observance of her canons in the fullest conviction that the end which she
aims at as Church is the end which he also desires as emperor; that the
good life of her bishops and priests is essential for the good of society
in general; that the perfect orthodoxy of her creed is the dearest
possession, the pillar and safeguard, of his own government. Heresy and
schism are, in his sight, the greatest crimes against the State, as they
are the greatest sins against the Church and against God. In the course of
the two hundred years from Constantine to Justinian the Roman State, as
understood by the Illyrian peasant who ruled it for thirty-eight years, had
intertwined itself as closely with the Catholic Church as ever it had with
Cicero's "immortal gods" in the time of Augustus, or Trajan, or Decius. It
was the special pride and glory of Justinian to maintain intact this
alliance as the palladium of the empire. And, therefore, his legislation
touched every part of the ecclesiastical government, every dogma of the
Church's creed, and only on account of this alliance did the Church
acquiesce in such a legislation. I suppose that no greater contradiction
can ever be conceived than that which exists between the mind of Justinian
and the mind which now, and for a long time, has directed the nations of
Europe, so far as their governments are concerned in their attitude towards
the Church of God. In Europe are nations which are nurtured upon heresy and
schism, whether as the basis of the original rebellion which severed them
from the communion of the Church or a