of Constantinople, John the Faster and Cyriacus; and his former
friend the emperor Mauritius turned against him, so that he welcomed the
accession of Phocas, as a deliverance of the Church from unjust domination.
The unquestioning loyalty with which, as a civil subject, he welcomed this
accession has been unfairly used against him. As first of all the civil
dignitaries of the empire he could only accept what had been done at
Constantinople. But in all his fourteen years neither the difficulty of
circumstances nor the consideration of persons withheld him from carrying
out his resolutions with a patience and a firmness only equalled by
gentleness of manner. From beginning to end he considered himself, and
acted, as set by God to watch over the maintenance of the canons, the
discipline enacted by them, and so doing to perfect by his wisdom as well
as to temper by his moderation the vast fabric of the Primacy as it had
grown itself, and nurtured in its growth the original constitution of the
Church during nearly six hundred years.

We may now say a few words upon the Primacy itself as exerted by St. Leo at
the Council of Chalcedon, and the Primacy as exerted by St. Gregory in the
fourteen years from 590 to 604; also on the interval between them, and the
relative position of the bishop of Constantinople to Leo in the person of
Anatolius, and to Gregory in the person of John the Faster. We see at once
that the intention which Leo discerned in Anatolius, which he sternly
reprehended and summarily overthrew, has been fully carried out by John the
Faster, who, in documents sent to the Pope himself for revision, as
superior, terms himself ecumenical patriarch. Who had made him first a
patriarch and then ecumenical? The emperor alone. He is so called in the
laws of Justinian. The 140 years from Leo to Gregory are filled with the
continued rise of the Bishop of Nova Roma under the absolute power of the
emperor. He has succeeded not only in taking precedence of the legitimate
patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch; he has more than once stripped of
their rights the metropolitans and bishops subject to the great see of the
East, and himself consecrated at Constantinople a patriarch of Antioch by
order of the emperor of the day. This Acacius did, humbly begging the
Pope's pardon for such a transgression of the due order and hierarchy, and
repeating the offence against the Nicene order and constitution on the
first opportunity. In the sa