ncile the Pope to him, but all were
fruitless, as he would not give up the point in dispute. "It seems," says
Tillemont, "that he continued resolved to do nothing in prejudice of the
rights he believed to belong to his Church, but that seeing the two great
powers of Church and State united against him, he remained quiet and
silent, occupied only in the work of his salvation, and that of his
people." During the four years he survived, he redoubled his austerities
and good works: he died in the odour of sanctity; and after his death, "St.
Leo, though still persuaded that he was a presumptuous spirit, calls him
'of holy memory.' Yet, we have neither proof nor probability that he had
restored him to his communion, from which he had cut him off."[67] His name
occurs in the Roman Martyrology.

Thus an encroachment, which had failed in Africa, succeeded through a
conjuncture of circumstances, especially the intervention of the civil
power, in Gaul. Of course it was made the stepping-stone to further
advances. This one specimen may give us a notion how the lawful power of
the Patriarch and the recognised pre-eminence of the one Apostolic See of
the West had a continual tendency to develop, and won, by degrees,
unlimited control over the original and acknowledged rights of the Bishops
and Metropolitans. Still, even in the hands of St. Leo, this was merely an
extraordinary interference. Ravennius, the successor of this very St.
Hilary, was elected and consecrated by the Bishops of his province, who
then announced it to Pope Leo, and received a congratulatory answer.[68] He
says himself to the Bishops of the province of Vienne, "It is not for
ourselves that we defend the ordinations of your provinces, which perhaps
Hilarius may, according to his wont, falsely state to you, to render
disaffected the mind of your Holiness; but it is for you we claim them
through our solicitude." And again: "Decreeing this, that if any one of our
brethren in any province die, he who is known to be the Metropolitan of
that province, should claim to himself the ordination of the Priest."[69]

So long as the election and consecration of Bishops and Metropolitans were
thus free and canonical, the greatness of the central See could never
depress and extinguish the essential equality of the Episcopate. Let it be
remembered that St. Leo, with all his power and influence, consecrated no
other Bishops than those of Southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, which