of the whole house of God. Wherefore, knowing how your glorious Clemency cares for concord in the Church and for the things that belong to peaceful union, I beg and urgently entreat you to refuse your consent to impious attempts contrary to Christian peace, and to wholesomely restrain the dangerous ambition of my brother Anatolius, if he persists."[1] At the same time St. Leo writes to Anatolius himself. He praises his orthodoxy with regard to the Monophysite heresy. "But," he says, "a Catholic man, and especially a priest of the Lord, should not be corrupted by ambition any more than involved in error." He blames the uncanonical ordination of Maximus of Antioch (p. 36), insists on the 6th Nicene Canon, and adds: "The rights of provincial primates may not be injured, nor may metropolitan bishops be defrauded of their ancient privileges. The dignity that the Alexandrine See deserves because of St. Mark, the disciple of blessed Peter, must not perish; nor may the splendour of so great a Church be darkened because Dioscur falls through his obstinate wickedness. And the Antiochene Church, too, in which, by the preaching of the blessed Peter the Christian name first arose, should remain in the order arranged by the Fathers, so that having been put in the third place it should never be reduced to a lower one."[2] He wrote in the same sense to the Empress Pulcheria,[3] and all through his life steadily refused to acknowledge this 28th Canon. The result of the Pope's refusal was that the Canon was never inserted into any code of Canon Law, either Eastern or Western, till the Greeks revived it at the time of Photius's schism. It has never been the law of the Catholic Church.
Nevertheless from the end of the 5th century the See of Constantinople does gradually assume the second place after Rome. Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem went down in importance, as we have seen. The Emperors, indeed, deposed their own bishops and appointed new ones from laymen wantonly; the Patriarch was, after all, only a vassal of Cæsar, to whom he owed the place of his see. But the same Emperors
