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The Canons 4:24Council of Sardica of 343Some scholars have supposed that neither the present Greek nor the present Latin text represent the original, but that the Greek text is nearest to it, but must be corrected by an ancient Latin version found by Maffei in a codex at Verona. The Ballerini have devoted careful attention to this point in their notes to the Works of St. Leo the Great (Tom. iii., p. xxxij. 4). It would seem that this might be the canon quoted by the fathers of Constantinople in 382, and if so, it would seem that they had a Greek text like that from which the Verona version was made.Against the Donatists · Translator's introduction 2:20Optatus of MilevisWhen then we reflect that St. Optatus wrote in |xi the century preceding the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, in the very heart of what are sometimes known as 'Primitive Times,' when we remember that he was anterior to Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Leo the Great, when we recall the fact that the Reformation in Germany and England does not yet go back four hundred years, but that Optatus wrote six centuries before the Norman set foot on our English soil, and that some thousand years and then two hundred more were to elapse between the writings of Optatus and the breach with Rome over King Henry's divorce, it is a most striking and moving fact that this old Father of the Church bears his express and unequivocal witness not only to the necessity of union with the Cathedra Petri, but also to most of those Catholic Doctrines so violently assailed in the days of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Cranmer, Knox and their associates, and still denied on all sides around us.Five tomes against Nestorius · Introduction 9:25Cyril of AlexandriaIt did not occur to Nestorius that Divine truth is seen by simple piety, not by proud intellect. He was not aware also, that S. Celestine had a deacon who, like S. Athanasius when a deacon at Nicaea, possessed that intuitive perception of truth which was afterwards to be developed on these very subjects; him, who became S. Leo the Great, who entrusted the letters of Nestorius to be translated and refuted by Cassian .The 30 Canons 11:5Council of Chalcedon of 451Here is a great addition to the canon of 381, so ingeniously linked on to it as to seem at first sight a part of it. The words kai wste are meant to suggest that what follows is in fact involved in what has preceded: whereas a new point of departure is here taken, and instead of a mere "honorary pre-eminence" the bishop of Constantinople acquires a vast jurisdiction, the independent authority of three exarchs being annulled in order to make him patriarch. Previously he had proedria now he gains prostasia . As we have seen, a series of aggrandizements in fact had prepared for this aggrandizement in law; and various metropolitans of Asia Minor expressed their contentment at seeing it effected. "It is, indeed, more than probable that the self-assertion of Rome excited the jealousy of her rival of the East," and thus "Eastern bishops secretly felt that the cause of Constantinople was theirs" (Gore's Leo the Great. p. 120); but the gratification of Constantinople ambition was not the less, in a canonical sense, a novelty, and the attempt to enfold it in the authority of the Council of 381 was rather astute than candid. The true plea, whatever might be its value, was that the Council had to deal with a fait accompli, which it was wise at once to legalize and to regulate; that the "boundaries of the respective exarchates ... were ecclesiastical arrangements made with a view to the general good and peace of the Church, and liable to vary with the dispensations to which the Church was providentially subjected," so that "by confirming the ek pollou krathsan eqoj " in regard to the ordination of certain metropolitans (see Ep. of Council to Leo, Leon. Epist. xcviij., 4), "they were acting in the spirit, while violating the letter, of the ever-famous rule of Nicaea, ta arkeia eqh krateito (cp. Newman, Transl. of Fleury, iii., 407). It is observable that Aristenus and Symeon, Logothetes reckon this decree as a XXIX canon (Justellus, ii., 694, 720).The Canons 2:22Quinisext CouncilIn the same manner a second marriage always, and everywhere, incapacitated the clergy for Holy Orders and the Episcopate. This appears from St. Paul, 1 Tim. Chap. iii., and Titus, Chap. i., and it was expressly enactedby the sixteenth of the Apostolical Canons, renewed by the Popes Siricius, Innocent and Leo the Great, and may be gathered from the ancient fathers and councils generally received in the Church.