AND FROM ST. LEO I. TO ST. GREGORY I . BY AUTHOR OF THE "FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM"; "CHURCH AND STATE AS SEEN IN THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM"; "THE THRONE OF THE FISHERMAN"; "A LIFE'S DECISION"; AND "PER CRUCEM AD LUCEM"     LONDON: BURNS & OATES, Limited NEW YORK: CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY CO. 1888...

Cardinal Mai has left recorded his judgment that, "in matter of fact, the whole administration of the Church is learnt in the letters of the Popes". [1] I draw from this judgment the inference that of all sources for the truths of history none are so precious, instructive, and authoritative as these authentic letters contemporaneous with the persons to whom they are addressed. The first which has been preserved to us is that of Pope St. Clement, the contemporary of St. Peter and St. Paul. It is

THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS. I ended the last chapter by drawing out that series of events in the Church's internal constitution and of changes in the external world of action outside and independent of the Church which combined in one result the exhibition to all and the public acknowledgment by the Church of the Primacy given by our Lord to St. Peter, and continued to his successors in the See of Rome. I showed St. Leo as exercising this Primacy by annulling the acts of an Ec

CÆSAR FELL DOWN. When St. Leo refused his assent to the Canons in favour of the see of Constantinople, which, at the end of the Council of Chalcedon, the Court, the clergy, and above all Anatolius, the bishop of the imperial city, desired to be passed, and with that intent overbore the resistance of the Papal legates, the race of Theodosius was still reigning both at Old and at New Rome. The eastern sovereigns, Marcian and Pulcheria, by becoming whose husband Marcian had ascended the throne, had

PETER STOOD UP. Seven days after the death of Gelasius, Anastasius, a Roman, ascended the apostolic throne, which he held from November, 496, to November, 498. We have two letters from him extant, both important. In that addressed upon his own accession, which he sent to the emperor Anastasius by the hands of Germanus, bishop of Capua, and Cresconius, bishop of Trent, on occasion of Theodorick's embassy for the purpose of obtaining the title of king, he strove to preserve the "Roman prince" from

JUSTINIAN. The submission of the eastern empire and episcopate to Pope Hormisdas, in 519, is a memorable incident in the history of the Church. A large and marked part in it was taken by the man who for thirty-eight years was to rule the eastern empire, to expel the Goths from Italy, thus recovering the original seat of Roman power, and the Vandals from Africa, and so once more attach the great southern provinces, for so many ages the granary of Rome and Italy itself, to the existing Byzantine r

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. The historian, [173] who has carefully followed the fortunes of Rome as a city during a thousand years, describes it as beginning a new life from the time when Narses, in the year 552, came to reside there as imperial prefect and representative of the absent eastern lord Justinian. Narses so ruled for fifteen years, but when he was recalled there ensued a long time of terrible distress and anxiety—a time of temporal servitude, but one also of spiritual expansion. The compl

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