nstantinople continually increasing.
They rested upon the imperial favour. And now in the case of John the
Faster they had gone so far that he prefixed his assumed title of
ecumenical patriarch to the very documents which he sent to the Pope for
revision. And this though the cause had been settled by himself, and had
now come before the Pope, whose power therefore to revise the sentence of
one who called himself ecumenical patriarch he did not dispute.

Nor, indeed, did it appear over what domain he claimed to be universal. It
might be over the eastern bishops; it might be over the two patriarchs of
Alexandria and Antioch, with the later patriarch of Jerusalem; it might be
over the actual Roman empire; it might be, finally, over the whole Church.
But whichever it might be, the claim would equally be, in Gregory's
judgment, unlawful, based simply and solely upon imperial power; resting
also in its origin upon a direct untruth, which assaulted the whole
foundation whereon the charge of the whole Church, the Principate of
Gregory, rested; couched, moreover, in language which would enable future
generations of Greeks to draw the conclusion that, since the Primacy of
Rome proceeded from its being the capital, when Rome ceased to be the
capital, and Constantine's city became the capital, the Primacy also passed
to it.

Thus, in the whole assumption of the bishops of Constantinople, it was
presupposed that the spiritual power and the hierarchy of the Church
descended not from Jesus Christ, but from the emperors.[193] So it is clear
that this empty title, which seemed to the emperor Mauritius a meaningless
word, a mere nothing, contained in itself the whole system of Antichrist.
The Pope saw it, and his words are the more significant when we remember
that at the time he uttered them the man had already reached full manhood
who was to cut the empire of Justinian in half, to deprive of their liberty
three of the eastern patriarchs, destroy a multitude of the Christian
people, and be parent of the religion which through the course of 1200
years has shown itself to be specially anti-Christian. There in his Arab
tent, as yet the faithful husband of an old wife, was the future Khalif,
in whom the spiritual and the temporal power would be joined together; who
would set up in a false theocracy that usurpation which Constantine's
eastern successors were striving to carry out in the Christian Church.
Mahommed would consecrate that very f