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 railways, canals, gas and water companies, &c., under acts of parliament, are also representative of the ancient practice.

 MONOTHELITES (, monothelitae, from Gr.  , only,  , to will), in Church history, the name given to those who, in the 7th century, while otherwise orthodox, maintained that Christ had only one will. Their effort, as defined by Dormer, was “an attempt to effect some kind of solution of the vital unity of Christ's person, which had been so seriously proposed by monophysitism, on the basis of the now firmly-established doctrine of the two natures.” The controversy had its origin in the efforts of the emperor Heraclius to win back for the church and the empire the excommunicated and persecuted Monophysites or Eutychians of Egypt and Syria. In Egypt especially the monophysite movement had assumed a nationalistic, patriotic character. It was in Armenia, while on his expedition against Persia, in 622 that, in an interview with Paul, the head of the Severians (Monophysites) there, Heraclius first broached the doctrine of the  of Christ, i.e. the doctrine that the divine and human natures, while quite distinct in His one person, had but one activity and operation. At a somewhat later date he wrote to Arcadius of Cyprus, commanding that “two energies” should not be spoken of; and in 626, while in Lazistan (Colchis), he had a meeting with the metropolitan, Cyrus of Phasis, during which this command was discussed, and Cyrus was at last bidden to seek further instruction on the subject from Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, a strong upholder of the , and the emperor’s counsellor with regard to it. So well did he profit by the teaching he received in this quarter that, in 630 or 631, Cyrus was appointed to the vacant patriarchate of Alexandria, and in 633 succeeded in reconciling the Severians of his province on the basis of  (one divine-human energy), He was, however, opposed by Sophronius, a monk from Palestine, who, after vainly appealing to Cyrus, actually went to Constantinople to remonstrate with Sergius himself. Shortly afterwards Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius, and received a friendly reply. Sophronius, however, who meanwhile had been made patriarch of Jerusalem (634), refused to be silenced, and in his Epistola synodica strongly insisted on the “two energies.” So intense did the controversy now become, that at last, towards the end of 638, Heraclius published an Ecthesis, or Exposition of the Faith (composed by Sergius), which prohibited the use of the phrase “one energy,” because of its disquieting effects on some minds, as seeming to militate against the doctrine of the two natures; while, on the other hand, the expression “two energies” was interdicted because it seemed to imply that Christ had two wills. That Christ had but one will was declared to be the only orthodox doctrine, and all the faithful were enjoined to hold and teach it without addition or deduction. The document was not acceptable, however, to Popes Severinus and John IV., the immediate successors of Honorius; and Maximus, the confessor, succeeded in stirring up such violent opposition in North Africa and Italy that, in 648, Constans II. judged it expedient to withdraw his grandfather’s edict, and to substitute for it his own Typus or Precept ( ), forbidding all discussion of the questions of the duality or singleness of either the energy or the will of Christ. The scheme of doctrine of the first four general councils, in all its vagueness as to these points, was to be maintained; so far as the controversy had gone, the disputants on either side were to be held free from censure, but to resume it

would involve penal consequences. The reply of the Western Church was promptly given in the unambiguously dyothelite decrees of the Lateran synod held by Pope Martin I. in 649; but the cruel persecutions to which both Martin and Maximus were exposed, and finally succumbed, secured for the imperial Typus the assent at least of silence. With the accession of Constantine Pogonatus in 668 the controversy once more revived, and the new emperor resolved to summon a general council. It met at Constantinople in 680, having been preceded in 679 by a brilliant synod under Pope Agatho at Rome, where it had been agreed to depart in nothing from the decrees of the Lateran synod. The will, Agatho said, is a property of the nature, so that as there are two natures there are two wills; but the human will determines itself ever conformably to the divine and almighty will.

 MONOTREMATA (a name referring to the single outlet for all the excretory channels of the body), the lowest subclass of the Mammalia, represented at the present day solely by the platypus and the echidnas. It has been proposed to replace this name, when used as a subclass, by Prototheria; but it is perhaps on the whole preferable to retain it both for the subclass and for the single order by which it is now represented, distinguishing the latter as Monotremata Vera.

Existing monotremes are characterized by the following features. In the first place they differ broadly from all other mammals in being oviparous, or possibly in the case of one family ovoviviparous; and also in the absence of mammae, or teats, the milk-glands opening on the surface of the skin of the breast by means of a number of fine pores. Moreover, the milk-glands themselves are commonly believed to represent sweat-glands and not those of other mammals, although it has been suggested that this distinction may not prove to be valid. In the strict sense of the term monotremes are not, therefore, mammals at all. Another feature in which these creatures differ from all other living mammals is the presence of a pair of coracoid bones, which articulate with the sternum, or breastbone, as well as of paired precoracoids, or epicoracoids, and an unpaired T-shaped interclavicle, the arms of which overlie the clavicles or collar-bones. In all these respects monotremes closely resemble many reptiles. The brain lacks a corpus callosum, or band of nerve-tissue connecting the two hemispheres. Again, the bodies of the vertebrae are for the most part without terminal caps, or epiphyses; and each rib articulates to the vertebral column solely by its head or capitulum, instead of by a capitulum and a tuberculum. More important is the circumstance that the testes, which remain throughout life within the abdominal cavity, do not discharge by means of their ureters into a urinary bladder, but into a urino-genital sinus, which is in close communication with the lower end of the alimentary canal, so that the genital and waste products of the body are discharged by means of a common tube, or cloaca—another reptilian feature, although met with in certain other mammals. As regards other soft parts, the heart has the valve dividing the right auricle and ventricle incomplete and to a great extent fleshy—a feature which may, in some degree, account for the lower temperature of monotremes as compared with higher mammals. The presence of an anterior abdominal vein, or at least its supporting membrane, running right through the abdominal cavity, is another distinctive feature of the group. Of less importance is the presence of a pair of epipubic, or marsupial, bones attached to the front edge of the pelvis. The females have a complete or rudimentary pouch on the abdomen.

In the presence of hair, the relatively high temperature of the blood, the absence of nuclei to the red blood-corpuscles, and the existence of only the left aortic arch, as well as in the absence of a separate quadrate-bone, and the simple structure of the lower jaw, monotremes conform to the ordinary mammalian type. On the other hand the skull of the platypus possesses a peculiar “dumbbell bone,” believed to represent the reptilian prevomer. 