write to the Bishops of the neighbouring province to be the judges of
it; and if the deposed Bishop persuade the Bishop of Rome to send a priest
from his own person, he shall be able to do it, and to send commissioners
to judge by his authority, together with the Bishops; but if he believes
that the Bishops are sufficient to settle the matter, he will do what his
wisdom suggests to him.' The judgment which Pope Julius, together with the
Council of Rome, had given in favour of Athanasius and the other persecuted
Bishops, seems to have given cause to this Canon, and we have seen that
this Pope complained that they had judged St. Athanasius without writing to
him about it."

Such is the modest commencement of that power of hearing episcopal causes
on appeal, which has been the instrument of obtaining the wonderful
authority concentrated by a long series of ages in the see of Rome. However
conformable to the practice of preceding centuries, as Thomassin says, this
may have been, this power is here certainly _granted_ by the Council, _not
considered as inherent in the see of Rome_. And this one fact is fatal to
the present claim of the supremacy. To use De Maistre's favourite analogy,
it is as though the States General or Parliament conferred his royal powers
on the Sovereign who convoked them, and whose assent alone made their
enactments law. Accordingly, like the whole course of proceedings in these
early Councils, it is incompatible with the notion of the Pope being the
monarch in the Church. We may safely say, history offers not a more
wonderful contrast in a power bearing the same name, than that here
conferred on Pope Julius in 347, and that exercised by Pope Pius the
Seventh in 1802. On the bursting out of the French revolution, out of a
hundred and thirty-six Bishops more than a hundred and thirty remained
faithful to God and the Church: some offered the testimony of their blood;
the rest became confessors in all lands for Christ's sake, in poverty,
contempt, and banishment. After ten years, the civil governor, who had
lately professed himself a Mahometan, proposes to the Pope to re-establish
the Church, but on condition of himself nominating to the sees, and those
not the ancient sees of the country, but a selection from them, to the
number of eighty. Thereupon the Pope requires those eighty Bishops and
Confessors who still survived, and whom he acknowledged to be not only
blameless, but martyrs for the name of Christ