state. Lydia
and Caria, Sardes and Miletus, were purified with the blood of the
obstinate Quartodecimans; and the edict of the emperor, or rather of the
patriarch, enumerates three-and-twenty degrees and denominations in
the guilt and punishment of heresy. But the sword of persecution which
Nestorius so furiously wielded was soon turned against his own breast.
Religion was the pretence; but, in the judgment of a contemporary saint,
ambition was the genuine motive of episcopal warfare.

In the Syrian school, Nestorius had been taught to abhor the confusion
of the two natures, and nicely to discriminate the humanity of his
_master_ Christ from the divinity of the _Lord_ Jesus. The Blessed
Virgin he revered as the mother of Christ, but his ears were offended
with the rash and recent title of mother of God, which had been
insensibly adopted since the origin of the Arian controversy. From the
pulpit of Constantinople, a friend of the patriarch, and afterwards the
patriarch himself, repeatedly preached against the use, or the abuse,
of a word unknown to the apostles, unauthorized by the church, and which
could only tend to alarm the timorous, to mislead the simple, to amuse
the profane, and to justify, by a seeming resemblance, the old genealogy
of Olympus. In his calmer moments Nestorius confessed, that it might
be tolerated or excused by the union of the two natures, and
the communication of their _idioms_: but he was exasperated, by
contradiction, to disclaim the worship of a new-born, an infant Deity,
to draw his inadequate similes from the conjugal or civil partnerships
of life, and to describe the manhood of Christ as the robe, the
instrument, the tabernacle of his Godhead. At these blasphemous sounds,
the pillars of the sanctuary were shaken. The unsuccessful competitors
of Nestorius indulged their pious or personal resentment, the Byzantine
clergy was secretly displeased with the intrusion of a stranger:
whatever is superstitious or absurd, might claim the protection of
the monks; and the people were interested in the glory of their virgin
patroness. The sermons of the archbishop, and the service of the altar,
were disturbed by seditious clamor; his authority and doctrine were
renounced by separate congregations; every wind scattered round the
empire the leaves of controversy; and the voice of the combatants on a
sonorous theatre reechoed in the cells of Palestine and Egypt. It was
the duty of Cyril to enlighten the