Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/163

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 141 disease was attended with the customary symptoms ; but the Greek clergy, as if satiate with the endless controversy of the incarnation^ instilled a healinir counsel into the ear of the prince and people. They declared themselves monothelites (asserters of the unity of will) ; but they treated the words as new^ the questions as superfluous, and recommended a religious silence as the most agreeable to the prudence and charity of the gospel. This law of silence was successively imposed by The ecthesis the ecthesis or exposition of Heraclius, the type or model of his ad. 639 [638], grandson Constans ; ^^^ and the Imperial edicts were subscribed constans. /* AD 643 with alacrity or reluctance by the four pati*iarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. But the bishop and monks of Jerusalem sounded the alarm ; in the language, or even in the silence, of the Greeks, the Latin churches detected a latent heresy ; and the obedience of pope Honorius to the commands of his sovereign was retracted and censur'^'^^ by the bolder ignorance of his successors. They condemned the execrable and abominable heresy of the Monothelites, who revived the errors of Manes, Apollinaris, Eutyches, &c. ; they signed the sentence of excommunication on the tomb of St. Peter ; the ink was mingled with the sacramental wine, the blood of Christ ; and no ceremony was omitted that could fill the superstitious minds with horror and affright. As the repre- [a.d. 649] sentative of the Western church, pope Martin and his Lateran synod anathematized the perfidious and guilty silence of the Greeks. One hundred and five bishops of Italy, for the most part the subjects of Constans, presumed to reprobate his wicked type and the impious ecthesis of his grandfather, and to confound the authors and their adherents with the twenty-one notorious heretics, the apostates from the church, and the organs of the devil. Such an insult under the tamest reign [Pope Martin could not pass with impunity. Pope Martin ended his days a.d. essj on the inhospitable shore of the Tauric Chersonesus, and his oracle, the abbot Maximus, was inhumanly chastised by the amputation of his tongue and his right hand.^^'' But the between Maximus and Pyrrhus (ad calcem torn. viii. Annal. Baron, p. 755-794 [Migne, Patr. Gr. xci. p. 288 sqq."]), which relates a real conference, and produced a short-lived conversion. fSee Appendix i.] '"5 Impiissimam ecthesim. . . scelerosum typum (Concil. toni. vii. p. 366), diabolicae operations geniniina (fors. germina, or else the Greek yenjuaTa, in the original ; Concil. p. 363, 364) are the expressions of the xviiith anathema. The epistle of pope Martin to Amandus, a Gallican bishop, stigmatizes the Mono- thelites and their heresy with equal virulence (p. 392). [The ecthesis declared the singleness of the Will.] 1"^ The sufferings of Martin and Maximus are described with pathetic simplicity