ing
him through the resident council. But Anastasius died, and the result of
the Acacian schism was a stronger confession of the Roman Primacy made to
Pope Hormisdas, the subject of the Arian Theodorick, by the whole Greek
episcopate, than had ever been given before. The sixth century and the
reign of Justinian completed the destruction of the civil state of Rome;
and the Primacy of its bishop, St. Gregory, was more than ever
acknowledged.

Not a shadow of usurpation or of claim to undue power rested upon that
unquestioned Primacy which St. Gregory exercised. While he thought the end
of the world was at hand, while he watched Rome perishing street by street,
he planted unconsciously a western Christendom in what he supposed all the
time to be a perishing world. Civil Rome was not even a provincial capital;
spiritual Rome was the acknowledged head of the world-wide Church.

I know not where to find so remarkable a contrast and connection of events
as here. Temporal losses, secular ambitions, episcopal usurpations, violent
party spirit, schism and heresy in the great eastern patriarchates, and
amid it all the descent of the Teutons on the fairest lands of the western
empire, the establishment of new sovereignties in Spain, Gaul, and Italy,
under barbarians who at the time of their descent were Arian heretics, and
afterwards became Catholic, with the result that Gregory has to keep watch
within the walls of Rome for a whole generation against the Lombard, still
in unmitigated savagery and unabated heresy, and that the world-wide Church
acknowledges him for her ruler without a dissenting voice. The "Servant of
the servants of God" chides and corrects the would-be "ecumenical
patriarch," who has risen since Constantine from the suffragan of a
Thracian city to be bishop of Nova Roma and right hand of the emperor; who
has deposed Alexandria from the second place and Antioch from the third,
but cannot take the first place from the See of Peter. The perpetual
ambition of the bishops of Nova Roma, the perpetual fostering of that
ambition for his own purpose by the emperor, only illustrates more vividly
the inaccessible dignity which both would fain have transferred to the city
of Constantine, but were obliged to leave with the city of Peter. As the
forum of Trajan sinks down stone by stone, the kings of the West are
preparing to flock in pilgrimage to the shrine of Peter. This was the
answer which the captives in the forum made t