presented. A successful career in the Church led to results not
unworthy of comparison with those that in former days had been
attained by a successful career in the army.

The ecclesiastical, and indeed, it may be said, much of the
political history of that time, turns on the struggles of the
bishops of the three great metropolitan cities--Constantinople,
Alexandria, Rome--for supremacy: Constantinople based her claims
on the fact that she was the existing imperial city; Alexandria
pointed to her commercial and literary position; Rome, to her
souvenirs. But the Patriarch of Constantinople labored under the
disadvantage that he was too closely under the eye, and, as he
found to his cost, too often under the hand, of the emperor.
Distance gave security to the episcopates of Alexandria and Rome.

ECCLESIASTICAL DISPUTES. Religious disputations in the East have
generally turned on diversities of opinion respecting the nature
and attributes of God; in the West, on the relations and life of
man. This peculiarity has been strikingly manifested in the
transformations that Christianity has undergone in Asia and
Europe respectively. Accordingly, at the time of which we are
speaking, all the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire exhibited
an intellectual anarchy. There were fierce quarrels respecting
the Trinity, the essence of God, the position of the Son, the
nature of the Holy Spirit, the influences of the Virgin Mary. The
triumphant clamor first of one then of another sect was
confirmed, sometimes by miracle-proof, sometimes by bloodshed. No
attempt was ever made to submit the rival opinions to logical
examination. All parties, however, agreed in this, that the
imposture of the old classical pagan forms of faith was