e eastern submission to Pope Hormisdas
was, in which Justinian, then a man of thirty-six, had taken large part;
clear and unambiguous as in his legislation appears the recognition of the
Two Powers, sacerdotal and imperial, which make together the joint
foundation of the State, and are a necessity of its wellbeing; distinct,
likewise, as is the imperial proclamation of the Pope as the first of all
bishops in his laws, his letters, confirmed by his reception of the Popes
Agapetus and Vigilius in his own capital city; frank and unembarrassed as
his acknowledgment of St. Peter's successors, yet, when he had reached the
mature age of seventy, and was lord by conquest of Rome reduced to absolute
impotence, and of Italy as a subject province, his treatment of the first
bishop, in the person of Vigilius, was a contradiction of his own laws as
to the two domains of divine and human things. He passed beyond the limits
which marked the boundaries of the two powers. He made himself the supreme
judge of doctrine. He convoked a General Council without the Pope's assent;
he terminated it without his sanction; he treated the Pope as a prisoner
for resisting such action. It is true that St. Peter's successor--and this
with a stain upon him which no successor of St. Peter had worn before
him--escaped with St. Peter's life in him unimpaired; but so far as the
action of Justinian went it was unfilial, inconsistent with his own laws,
perilous in the extreme to the Church, dishonouring to the whole
episcopate. The divine protection guarded Vigilius--that Vigilius whom an
imperious woman had put upon the seat of a lawful living Pope--from
sacrifice of the authority to which, on the martyrdom of his predecessor,
he succeeded. He died at Syracuse, and St. Peter lived after him
undiminished in the great St. Gregory. The names mean the same, the one in
Latin, the other in Greek; but no successor ever took on himself the
blighted name of Vigilius, while many of the greatest among the Popes have
chosen for themselves the name of Gregory, and one at least of the sixteen
has equalled the glory of the first.

In judging the conduct of Justinian, both in treatment of persons and in
dealing with doctrine, we cannot fail to see that the imperial duty of
protection passed into the imperial lust for mastery. If his treatment of
Vigilius, whom he acknowledged in the clearest terms as Pope, was
scandalous and cruel, still worse, if possible, was the assumptio