see.

few words. Melitius, who had thus been carried to his grave with all the honours of a saint, was the lawful, but, in the eyes of an extreme party at Antioch, not the orthodox, bishop of that He had in his youth, it was said, been infected by the subtle errors of Arius; and, in his later years, he had joined Basil in the noble attempts of that great divine to moderate the rage of controversy, and to accept, without further test or questioning, all who were willing to adopt the creed of Nicæa, which down to that time had expressed no precise definition of the complicated opinions that were now arising on the nature of the Third Person of the Trinity.* This moderation was the worst offence in the judgment of the partisans of extreme orthodoxy. They refused to communicate with Melitius; and they received from Sardinia, from the hands of the stern fanatic Lucifer of Cagliari, a bishop of the name of Paulinus, who became the head of a dissenting community within the Church of Antioch, priding itself on its superior orthodoxy, and refusing to acknowledge the legitimate bishop, and maintained chiefly in its position not by any countenance from the national churches of the East, but from the more eager† zealots of the Western Empire, who fanned the flames of discord. This ridiculous and causeless schism' (words equally applicable to such dissensions, whether in the fourth century or in the nineteenth) had engaged the attention of Melitius before he left his diocese. The case had been referred to the imperial counsellors, who had decided in Melitius's favour; and he then proposed to Paulinus, as a middle course, that the government of the Church should remain in statu quo till the death of either, in which case the other should succeed to the vacant see. To this, after some hesitation, Paulinus acceded; and all the chief clergy at Antioch swore to observe the compact.

On the death of Melitius, the very case provided for had occurred; and Gregory immediately proposed to the Council that the convention should be carried out. He appealed to the oaths by which it was supported; he reminded them that ' if two angels were candidates for the disputed see, the quarrel was not worth the scandal it occasioned.' With a disinterestedness the more remarkable because he had been fiercely attacked by Paulinus for his moderate counsels in former times, he entreated them to abide by the agreement, and hinted at the danger of rousing the passions of the western bishops, who were

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in favour of their nominee Paulinus. Never did Gregory plead with more eloquence or in behalf of a juster cause. But he pleaded in vain. Even before Melitius's death, the contending factions in this Antiochene quarrel had flown at each others' throats, canvassing right and left everyone that came across them, with cheers and counter-cheers.* The question had passed from the region of justice and of faith into a mere party struggle. Now that the time for a pacific settlement had arrived, the Melitians would not hear of submitting to the odious Paulinus. Nor could they be conciliated by the appeal of Gregory. His influence had been shaken by his weakness in the affair of Maximus-and, besides, his allusion to the fear of the West roused all the slumbering passions of the jealous East. He has himself described the effect of his speech: A yell, rather than a cry, broke from the assembled epis'copate.' They threw dust in his face; they buzzed about 'him like a swarm of wasps; they cawed against him like an army of crows.' The young were most ardent, but they were hounded on by the old. An argument against the West, which seemed to the youthful partisans of the East irresistible, was that Christianity must follow the course of the sun, not from west to east, but from east to west; and the Eastern bishops supported this view, showing their tusks,' says Gregory, as if they had 'been wild boars.' From the midst of this tumult, he appealed to Modarius, an Imperial officer, a Goth, (probably therefore an Arian), to allay the ecclesiastical clamour. He pointed out to him that these episcopal gatherings, so far from putting an end to the evil, merely added confusion to confusion. It would seem that this appeal was also in vain. Theodosius, whether from scruple or policy, was determined to leave the bishops to themselves. The celebrated precedent set by Constantine at Nicea had passed into a law. That sagacious ruler, when he received the mutual complaints and accusations of the bishops of the First General Council against each other, put them all into the fire without reading them; and in accordance with this contemptuous but charitable act, an imperial decree was passed on the occasion of this Second Council,§ prohibiting bishops to appear against each other in courts of law. Theodosius, how

ever, though unwilling to interfere directly, determined to exercise an indirect influence on the largest scale. He summoned from across the border the only western bishops who were avail*Gregory, De Vit. 1555.

† De Vit. 1805.

+ Ep. 136.

Cod. Theod. xi. t. 39, 1. 9. As explained, with every appearance of reason, by M. de Broglie (vol. i. p. 434), after Godefroi.

able-those of Macedonia, which, according to the division then established, belonged to the Western Empire. Their appearance might have turned the scale in behalf of Gregory's counsels but at the same moment that they entered Constantinople, there arrived in the Golden Horn an equal accession to the opposite faction from Egypt. The Egyptian bishops were with their new Pope,' and boiling over with indignation against Gregory for his rejection of their old favourite Maximus. The Macedonian bishops also proved more unmanageable than Theodosius had anticipated. They brought with them, as Gregory expresses it, the rough breath of the North-Wester." Their uncompromising austerity, and the subtle controversial spirit of the Eastern prelates, found a common ground in attacking the unfortunate Gregory. There was one joint in his ecclesiastical harness which presented an opening for the darts of the rigid precisians of the time. The Council of Nicæa had peremptorily forbidden, on pain of deprivation from orders, any translation-not only from see to see, but from parish to parish. From that hour to this, in every church of Christendom, human ambition and obvious convenience have been too strong for the decree even of so venerable a body as the First Ecumenical Council. But, general as the violation of the decree was, it was only when personal interests could be served by reviving it, that attention was called to the practice. Gregory had been Bishop of Sasima, before he was elevated to the see of Constantinople. This was enough; and although the fact had been perfectly known at the time when his election to the see was confirmed by this very Council; although there was no reason for proceeding against him, rather than against any the many bishops and presbyters who had equally broken the decree of Nicæa; although there was no reason for reviving the question in his case at this particular moment; yet the leading members of the Council had the incredible meanness to condemn in him what they forgave in those with whom they had no quarrel; to take advantage of his temporary unpopularity to press against him a measure which justice would have required to be pressed against numberless others. To Gregory personally the retirement from his bishopric was no great sacrifice. The episcopate had always been a burden to him; he neighed like an imprisoned horse for his green pastures of study and leisure.' He determined at once to make himself the Jonah of the tempest.' Yet when it came to the point, even he could not believe that the Council would have

* De Vit. 1860-70.

of

the base ingratitude to accept a resignation so nobly and promptly offered. But generosity towards a fallen foe is a difficult virtue. A few, in disgust at their associates, followed Gregory as he left the Council. The rest remained, and rejoiced in the departure of an honest and therefore a troublesome chief. I have not time or disposition,' says Gregory, 'to un'ravel their intrigues, so I will be silent.' He then visited the Emperor hoping, perhaps in spite of himself, to obtain a reversal of his own sentence. But Theodosius, though far more deeply affected than the Synod, adhered to the resolution of leaving the bishops to settle their own affairs; and after a pathetic and eloquent farewell, delivered in the Church of the Apostles; after a glowing description-true even after the vicissitudes of 1300 years-of the great opportunities of Constantinople, the eye of the world, the knot which links 'together East and West; the centre in which all extremes. 'combine,'- Gregory quitted that glorious city for ever, and hastened to bury his old age and his cares in the solitude of his ancestral home at Nazianzus. We may think, perhaps, that he would have acted a more dignified part, had he buried in oblivion all remembrance of the causes of his retirement. But history has ratified the truth of the invectives which his vanity or his righteous indignation extorted from him. The pent-up flood of his emotion, as he says, could not be restrained,* and the result is an elaborate picture of the bishops of that time, doubtless of those whom he had known at the Council, and who had cast him out from their ranks as 'an evil and unholy man.' This extraordinary description, although doubtless, in some of its features, it has had counterparts since, would be justly considered a libel on any modern ecclesiastical assembly, and is thus instructive, as showing the impression produced on a contemporary and a canonized saint by an institution and an age, to which later times have looked back with such unquestioning reverence. They are 'actors on a gigantic scale.' They walk on stilts.' They grin through borrowed masks.' They seem to him as though they

Ad Episc. (vol. ii. pp. 824, 829).

†M. de Broglie (by an illusion not uncommon in modern ecclesiastical writers) has evaded some of these dark colours by transferring them to the Arian Bishops; much in the same way as the mutual recriminations of the Bishops of Nicæa have been disposed of by wrongly referring them to the heretics. But there can be no question that Gregory is speaking of those who dismissed him from his office (see De Episc. 150; Ad Episc. 110), and therefore of the whole Council collectively.

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had come in answer to the summons of a herald who had convoked to the Council all the gluttons, villains, liars, falseswearers of the Empire. They are chamelions that change their colour with every stone over which they pass.' They are illiterate, low-born, filled with all the pride of upstarts fresh from the tables of false accountants,' 'peasants from the plough,' or from the spade, 'unwashed blacksmiths,' 'deserters from the army and navy, still stinking from the holds of the ships,' or with the brand of the whip or the iron on their bodies. The refined Gregory was doubtless acutely sensitive to the coarseness of vulgarity and the ignorance which 'never knows when to be silent.' But he is aware of the objection that the Apostles might be said also to have been unlearned men. 'Yes,' he replies, as if anticipating the argument of the apostolical or papal succession, but it must be a real Apostle; give me one such, and I will reverence him however • illiterate.'* 'But these,' he returns to the charge, ́timeservers waiting not on God, but on the rise and flow of the tides, or the straw in the wind'-' angry lions to the small, fawning spaniels to the great flatterers of ladies' -snuffing up the smell of good dinners '-' ever at the gates not of the wise but of the powerful't- unable to speak themselves, but having sufficient sense to stop the tongues ' of those who can'-'made worse by their elevation'—" affecting manners not their own '-the long beard, the downcast look, the head bowed, the subdued voice '-' the slow walkthe got-up devotee '- the wisdom anywhere but in the 'mind.'

are

If such is a faithful character of the prelates at the Council, it needed not any special provocation to justify the well-known protests of Gregory, which the partisans of ecclesiastical hierarchies have vainly tried to explain away, and which, in fact, are even tame and flat after these sustained invectives. Councils, congresses, we greet afar off, from which (to use very "moderate terms) we have suffered many evils.' I will not 'sit in one of those Councils of geese and cranes.' 'I fly from every meeting of bishops, for I never saw a good end of any such,§ nor a termination, but rather an addition of evils.'

The Council was thus left without a head, and Constantinople without a bishop. Accordingly, one of the chief objects for which the Synod had been called together was by its * Ad Episc. pp. 200-230.

† De Episc. pp. 330-350, 635.
† Πιστὸς ἐσκευασμένος, Ibid. 150.

§ Ibid. vol. ii. p. 106, 110; De Vit. 855.