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Rh I pass over the details of this quarrel. The Emperor tried to reconcile the parties; then affected to depose John, Nestorius, Cyril and Memnon of Ephesus. Eventually he was persuaded that Cyril was right, he let him go back to Egypt, and allowed a new Bishop of Constantinople, Maximian (431–434), to be ordained in place of the deposed Nestorius. This means the triumph of St. Cyril's theology in the great Church. From now Nestorianism is a heresy condemned by a general council, soon to become the teaching of a schismatical sect.

After his deposition Nestorius practically disappears from history. In 435 he was banished to a distant monastery at the bottom of the Libyan desert. Here he spent his last years writing his defence under a pseudonym; and he died on the eve of the Council of Chalcedon.

Among Protestant writers there is often a tendency to rehabilitate people whom the Church has condemned, to declare that an alleged heretic was grossly misrepresented, was really a person of irreproachable views falsely accused of heresy because of some political intrigue. Of no one has this been said so persistently as of Nestorius. His defence is not a new idea. For many years it has been the fashion either to ridicule the whole controversy or to say that he and Cyril really agreed entirely—the question was only one of words; or that what Cyril taught was