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 718 CANON LAW peared toward tlie end of the 3d century. It does not throw any new light on the discipline of that period, as* it agrees on all points with the canons. The next collection that we meet with in the East is that which was produced in the council of Chalcedon, in the 5th century, | called the Codex Ganonum. It seems to have contained originally canons enacted in the gen- eral council of Nice, and in those of Ancyra, Neo-Ceesarea, and Gangra. These three coun- cils, although not oecumenical or general ones, ; had obtained great authority throughout the whole eastern church, and their enactments were universally adopted. In course of time the Codex was enlarged by the addition of the canons of a council held at Antioch, and of those of the council of Chalcedon itself, and lastly of those adopted in the next general council held at Constantinople. These were the principal collections of canon law in the early centuries. In the West there seems to have been no collection of this sort made be- fore the council of Nice. Custom, the decrees of the bishops of Rome, which were issued as occasion required, and those of particular syn- , ods, were the basis of ecclesiastical legislation during the first three centuries. The can- ons promulgated at Nice were translated into Latin immediately after the celebration of the council, and were observed in the western church, together with those enacted a short time afterward at Sardica. After some time two Latin translations appeared of the Codex which was used at Chalcedon ; one was called Isidoriana, or of Isidore ; the other prisca, or ancient. In reality, then, up to the fith cen- tury there was no regular collection of ecclesi- astical laws in the western church. This want was at that period supplied by Dionysius Exi- guus, a learned monk, who published a cele- brated collection, which has ever since borne his name. It contained the principal points of the legislation of both branches of the church : the 30 canons of the apostles, then those of Nice, Ancyra, Neo-Ceesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon, trans- lated from the Greek; the 21 canons of Sar- dica, from the Latin original, together with 138 enacted in different councils of Africa. These formed the first pai't. The second em- braced the decretals of the popes Siricius, In- nocent I., Zosimus, Boniface I., Celestine, Leo the Great, Gelasius, and Anastasius II. These decretals were letters sent by the popes to different bishops or churches, containing those decrees which they deemed necessary for the maintenance of discipline and the good of re- ligion. These, as is evident, formed no unim- portant part of church law. To the above mentioned were afterward added the decretals of the popes Hilarius, Felix II., Simplicius, Hor- misdas, Symmachus, and Gregory II. The col- lection of Dionysius thus augmented was pre- sented in the 8th century to Charlemagne, by Pope Adrian I., when the former came to Rome. Adrian did not give it any new public authori- ty ; yet from the fact of. his having presented it, and from the quasi sanction thereby he- stowed, it acquired great importance, and was called emphatically the Codex Ganonum, or code of canons. Such were the principal documents through which access could be had to the knowledge of ecclesiastical legislation during the first nine centuries of the Christian era. Thus far the science of ecclesiastical legisla- tion had advanced in a regular and more or less uniform way. The churchmen had copied the forms of the old civil lawyers, and many made ecclesiastical polity the study of their lives. With the destruction of the Western empire, and the universal subversion of all the ancient landmarks of civilization and learning, the church law had to undergo some of the calamities of the age. The barbaric rulers often brought charges against leading ecclesiastics, either for the purpose of con- fiscating the property of the church, or of re- venging the condemnation of their vices ; and as the knowledge of canon law had shared in the decline of all science, the churchmen were left unprotected, from a want of acquaintance with laws which would have extricated them from their difficulties. A new collection was therefore required, and did in fact appear, but unfortunately the real erudition of the work was tainted by an inexcusable spirit of impos- ture on the part of the author. He gave him- self a feigned name, that of Isidore Mercator (merchant), or Peccator (sinner). It is not very clearly known who he really was. The most probable opinion seems to be that his real name was Benedictus Levita, or the deacon, liv- ing at Mentz in the 9th century. The docu- ments of which this collection was composed can be divided into three classes. There were some perfectly genuine, and attributed to their real authors ; next, others substantially so, but published under the name of popes or councils to whom they did not belong ; others, again, were altogether spurious, and perhaps invented by Isidore himself. The English Bishop Beve- ridge, after much erudite and patient toil, dis- covered that all the decrees or letters invented by the impostor were in reality nothing but tissues of passages selected from the canons of councils, epistles of popes, and works of eccle- siastical writers, especially of the 5th and 6th centuries. Isidore was everywhere held in honor, till on the revival of letters doubts arose as to the genuineness of parts of his work. During this time the collection of John Scholas- ticus, who flourished in the 6th century, was the principal one in the East. Photins revised it, and added many important laws, and it yet remains the basis of the legislation of the Greek church. Up to the 1 3th century the principal collections in the West were those of Burchard. Ivo, .and Cardinal Deusdedit. At last, how- ever, the light dawned, sciences and literature began to be cultivated, and the civil law of the Roman empire became the subject of profound and toilsome investigation. Gratian, a Benedic-