Ephesus in 431,
in passing their 8th, the Fathers of Constantinople in 381, in passing
their 2d and 3d Canons, and in the synodal letter addressed to the Pope and
the Western Bishops, the Fathers of Nicea, in passing their 6th, nay, all
ancient Councils whatever, in all their form and mode of proceeding, were
the most audacious of rebels. But what are we to say about the language of
St. Gregory? Did he then betray those rights of St. Peter, which he held
dearer than his life? When he wrote to Eulogius of Alexandria, "If your
Holiness calls me Universal Pope, you deny that you are yourself what you
admit me to be--universal. But this God forbid:" are we to receive
Thomassin's explanation, that he meant, as Patriarch, he was not universal,
but, as Pope, he was, all the time? or when he says to the same, "in rank
you are my brother, in character my father," was Eulogius at the same time,
as Bellarmine will have it, merely his deputy? "In the beginning, Peter set
up the Patriarch of Alexandria, and of Antioch, who, receiving authority
from the Pontiff (of Rome), presided over almost all Asia and Africa, and
could create Archbishops, who could afterwards create Bishops."[163] And
this, it appears, is the key which is to be applied to the whole history of
the early Church. Those Bishops, Metropolitans, Exarchs, and Patriarchs,
throughout the East, who had such a conviction of the Apostolic authority
residing in themselves as governors of the Church, who showed it in every
Council in which they sat, who expressed it so freely in their writings and
letters: St. Augustin, again, in the West, himself a host, who speaks of a
cause decided by the Roman Pontiff being reheard, of "the wholesome
authority of General Councils," who assents to St. Cyprian's proposition,
that "every Bishop can no more be judged by another, than he himself can
judge another," with the single limitation, "certainly, I imagine, in those
questions which have not yet been thoroughly and completely settled;" who,
in a question of disputed succession, which more than any other required
such a tribunal as the Papal, had it existed, appeals not to the authority
of the Roman See, but to the testimony of the whole Church spread
everywhere, not mentioning that See pre-eminently; or when he does mention
"the See of Peter, in which Anastasius now sits," mentioning likewise "the
See of James, in which John now sits:"--all these were nothing more, at the
same time, than t