of Sergius he issued an edict entitled Ecthesis[1]—an Exposition of the faith. This was intended as a pacific regulation. It forbade the use of the word "activity"[2] in connection with the whole subject, and expressly prohibited the assertion of two activities as leading to the idea of two wills, which might be contrary one to the other. Thus it was distinctly Monothelete; it took the notion of the one will for granted. The Ecthesis was approved by councils at Constantinople, under Sergius and his successor Pyrrhus, and at Alexandria, under Cyrus—which was to be expected since these were now the two Monothelete centres. The other two Eastern patriarchates—which would have taken the opposite view—were silent. An awful calamity had overtaken them. The cities of Antioch and Jerusalem were now both in the hands of the Arabs; the Mohammedan wave of conquest had swept over Syria and Palestine. The new pope John condemned the document. Thus the papacy was purged of heresy. Then Heraclius was alarmed. These were not times for quarrelling with so powerful a man as the chief personage in the West. The one object of his ecclesiastical policy had been the consolidation of his empire in face of the devastating flood of Mohammedanism. The irony of history is rarely more apparent than in this dividing of Christendom on fine and yet finer points of doctrine at the very moment when its very existence is at stake. It is like the suicidal folly of the Jews at Jerusalem in carrying on civil war among themselves while the Roman legions were at their gates. Heraclius saw the danger and wrote at once to the pope disowning the unfortunate edict and throwing the blame of it on poor Sergius.
Ten years later (a.d. 648) Constantine iv., the grandson of Heraclius, issued another mandatory document which was called the Type,[3] that is to say, the model of faith.[4] This was less theological than the Ecthesis, and entirely neutral in tone. It forbade further discussion on the question of
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