they bear witness with us. The causes,
adverted to above, which were so influential in exalting the great fabric
of Roman power in the West, did not act upon the East,--nay, acted in the
inverse direction. The See of Constantinople still remains where the
Council of Chalcedon placed it, where the Emperor Justinian recognised it
to be, the second See of the world: and it has ever since refused to admit
that Rome was _first_ in any sense in which itself was not _second_. This
may serve to set in a clear light the vast difference between the
legitimate power of the First See, and the claim to give jurisdiction to
all Bishops. The systems, of which these are expressions, are in truth
antagonistic. Constantinople maintains still that constitution of the whole
Church which St. Gregory accused its Bishops of undermining. The evil which
he foresaw has come from his own successors: "the cause of Almighty God,
the cause of the Universal Church," the privileges and rights of Bishops
and Priests, as against one "Universal Pope," are borne witness to now, as
they have ever been, by the immutable East. Here, at least, are no
sympathies with the heresiarchs of the sixteenth century: the Synod of
Bethlehem has anathematised Luther and Calvin as decidedly as the Council
of Trent. Here was no Henry the Eighth fixing his supremacy on a reluctant
Church by the axe, the gibbet, the stake, and laws of premunire and
forfeiture: no State using that Church as a cat's-paw for three hundred
years, and ready now to offer it up a holocaust to the demon of liberalism.
Here is the ancient Patriarchal system, the thrones of Constantinople,
Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, subsisting still. Here is the same body
of doctrine, the same seven sacraments, the same Real Presence, the same
mighty sacramental and sacerdotal system, which Latitudinarian and
Evangelical, statesman and heretic, dread while they hate, as being indeed
the visible presence of Christ in a fallen world,--the residence of a
spiritual power which controls and torments the worldling, while it
disproves and falsifies the heretic. Here is all that the Roman Catholic
claims as tokens of the truth for himself: but there is one thing more, the
same protest that we make against the monarchical, as distinct from the
patriarchal, power, the same appeal back to early Councils, and the
unambiguous voice of those who cannot be silenced or corrupted, the Fathers
of the Church. In the Fathers of the