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And when he died Flavian accepted the Henotikon of Zeno; and he expressly confirmed the three holy Ecumenical Councils, but to please the emperor he passed over in silence that of Chalcedon. Now the emperor Anastasius sent order by the tribune Eutropius to Flavian and Elias of Jerusalem to hold a council in Sidon, and to anathematise the holy Council of Chalcedon.
This is what draws down the blessing of God, and which makes so many houses subsist, without any revenue, by the charity of the faithful. The holy Patriarch of the Friars Minor arrived at Rome when everything was preparing for the opening of the Twelfth Ecumenical Council, the 4th of Lateran, one of the most numerous ever held in the Church.
Science should be the handmaid of the church, philosophy its helpful brother; but its ecumenical council, its court of last resort, should be the religious instinct inherent in man that perception so fine, so subtle, that all attempts to weave it into words to clothe it so that the eye may perceive and the reason handle it, have signally failed; which logic has hammered at with all her ballistae and battering-rams for thirty centuries or more in vain; which, above all things else, binds the human race in one great brotherhood, has supplied the missing links in every cult, bridged its laches, surmounted its incongruities, comprised its inexpugnable fortress upon which the high flood-tide of worldly wisdom beats in vain.
In this respect the Anglican communion has developed on the lines defined in her articles at the Reformation; but, though in principle there is no great difference between a church defined by national, and a church defined by racial boundaries, there is an immense difference in effect, especially when the race as in the case of the English is itself ecumenical.
And that the only ecclesiastical government warranted by Christ is his word, and to continue in his church unalterable, is Presbyterial church government, exclusive of all superior dignity above a teaching presbyter, and consisting in her judicative capacity of kirk-sessions, in subordination to presbyteries; of presbyteries, in subordination to provincial synods; of provincial synods, in subordination to national; and national to ecumenical assemblies, or general councils.
We see at once that the intention which Leo discerned in Anatolius, which he sternly reprehended and summarily overthrew, has been fully carried out by John the Faster, who, in documents sent to the Pope himself for revision, as superior, terms himself ecumenical patriarch. Who had made him first a patriarch and then ecumenical? The emperor alone. He is so called in the laws of Justinian.
The Pope, behind the crumbling walls of Aurelian, shudders at the cruelties practised on his people: the bishop of Constantinople, by terming himself ecumenical, announces ostentatiously that he claims to rule all his brethren in the East that he is supreme judge over his brother patriarchs.
I. In the autumn of 1418, after the breaking up of the Council of Constance, Bracciolini left Italy and accompanied to England a member of the Plantagenet family, the second son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Henry Beaufort, whose placid and beardless face the great Florentine seems to have first seen at the Ecumenical Council which that princely prelate had turned aside to visit in the course of a pilgrimage he was making to Jerusalem.
He had no appreciation of the writings of the Fathers, of the detail or development of doctrine, of the definite traditions of the Church viewed in their matter, of the teaching of the ecumenical councils, or of the controversies out of which they arose. He took an eager, courageous view of things on the whole.
But by and by a great occasion arises a revival which sweeps the country, a reunion of two long-divided parties, an Ecumenical Council, a Chinese persecution and suddenly there arises before the mind's eye a glimpse of that Church which girdles the world, whose emissaries are in every country, whose voices speak in every tongue. We perceive that everywhere are
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