Cæs. P.
Licinius

Aug. II.

the entombment-list not of martyrs but of bishops'. His Valerianus original sepulchral slab with Greek characters, and no mention Pius Felix of martyrdom, adds simply the most interesting of the Imp. Cæs. examples of the vulgar termination, common in Greek, Jewish, Egnatius or Græcizing-Latin Inscriptions during the third century, but Pius Felix almost extinct before the end of the fourth.

P. Licinius

Gallienus

Aug.

AOYKIC

The incidents of the last few pages, difficult, and almost fretful, for criticism to elicit and to combine with so much certainty, will not seem trivial to those who perceive through them, how firm and subtle were the new threads which were now being drawn through all society, securing the allegiance of imperial antient houses, drawing to the centre of influence men who had not even a family

1

III NON. MAR. LUCI IN CALISTO. Mommsen, op. cit. p. 631. III NON. MAR. CONS. SS. Catal. Liber. Lipsius, op. cit. p. 267. The Liberian list is not only wrong in carrying this date into the 3rd consulship of Valerian and 2nd of Gallienus (A.D. 255) under whom it puts down also the death of Stephanus over four years later, but irreconcilable with its own date of 3 years 8 months 10 days which it counts from Gallus II. Volusian I. (A.D. 252).

2 We have AITOPIC A.D. 263,

AYPHAIC temp. Anton. P. From the Jewish cemetery at Rome гAIC, KACTPIKIC, ACTEPIC, NOYMENIE. Ritschl by such examples as Cæcilis, Clodis shews it not to have been a wholly modern corruption, and thinks it archaic. The latest instances we have are TAPACIC A.D. 461, and OYPANIC vith or viith. cent. Rossi, R. S. vol. 11. pp. 66, 8. From Felician Catalogue, Lipsius, p. 275, quotes CORNILIS.

name, knitting together classes that had been apart since Roman law began;-how a new moral magistracy grappled with the sins which underlay crimes;-how possible it was to fall out of such an association, and then-how men would give all things-health, wealth, connection, honours-to be restored to it.

III.

STEPHANUS.

The Church not identified with or represented by Rome.

Cyprian's relations with Rome soon afterwards underwent a great change. It takes effort to view with candid and clear vision, so as to see them in their first meaning, such facts and expressions as controversies have since coloured and shaded. Yet the truth is that what was confused and beclouded while nothing but amity existed was made distinct by variances. The dignity of the Roman See was in Cyprian's eyes that of an inherited precedency and presidency, and not due merely to the fact that, if Carthage was the second city of the world, Rome was its mistress'.

But that even its more moderate claims to spiritual supremacy are a doctrine unknown to Cyprian is evidenced, as we have seen, by the definite alterations which Roman divines have introduced into his language and maintain there'.

Exemplifications of his real theory are 'writ large' in his corrections of the successor of Lucius. Long before the bitterness of theological difference arose between them, in dealing with moral cases of Lapse, we had to look onward, and we saw how the church of Africa received appeals against two

1 Milman and others assign rather too much weight to this. Cf. Ep. 59. 14. See pp. 195, 196 above.

2 See a very profligate blazon of that theory as a historic fact in Freppel, pp. 128-130 and 218-20.

ecclesiastical judgments of the Roman Bishop and reversed them'. Presently we shall find him admonished of his duty toward a Novatianist and desired to transmit an account of his discharge of it to Carthage. The Christian world contemned his arrogance, while it confirmed his practice in Baptism. Modern Rome outdoes his pretensions and freely uses the Rebaptism he rightly condemned.

It might at first sight seem as if only one common link could hold together alliances so inconsistent with each other, alliances with Lapsed, with Novatianists, who stood equally aloof from Lapsed and from Heretics, and with the Heretics themselves,—a consistent opposition to Cyprian. It might seem as if nothing but uniform contravention of Cyprian's policy in its three branches could evolve such variety. Stephen might wish to abolish out of Rome the influence to which his predecessor had yielded; Cyprian's Petrine unity, he might say, was but theoretical, his practical Episcopal unity threatened the Roman unity. But if he could force Cyprian into opposition to his See and its Traditions, that Petrine theory of his would serve to put Cyprian in the wrong, and leave him on his own shewing no better than a Novatianist3.

But mortal opponency surely never ran so wild a length. At any rate, of this low subtlety there is no appearance on the part of Stephen. Indeed at Rome, where Cornelius was so much more of a presence than Cyprian, the effect to the eye of the Church would be that of an onslaught upon Cornelius and his councils rather than on Cyprian. Besides it had virtually been Cornelius who modified Cyprian's puritanism. When Stephen restored peccant bishops he was following Callistus; when he condemned Rebaptism he was appealing to tradition older than Callistus'. In all the letters

1 Pp. 233, 234 above. Ep. 67. 2 Ep. 68.

Hippolytus, adv. omnes Hæreses, ix. 12, cf. 7.

So Ritschl.

to and about him Cyprian never writes as if Stephen were making capital out of his own Petrine unity; he repeats the theory'. He shews no consciousness that his view of episcopal unity is disputed or is likely to be disputed by Stephen. He strongly states his conviction of the truth and antiquity of the African discipline, but acknowledges in Stephen as in other bishops the right and the responsibility of differing. Thus there is no trace of that diplomacy with which Stephen is ingeniously credited by moderns: nor yet of the mere obstinacy of which he is accused by his contemporary3.

The business of history is not to be reviving blots which have faded from the world's mind, but to mark and trace all life which was ever true and all truth which ever lives.

Our material is sufficient to indicate that from the first Stephen had no leaning towards rules which his predecessors and Cyprian had laid down for themselves. His temper (which so often corresponds to, even if it does not interpret, a policy) was that of a man averse to strictness, and severe only with those who wished to see him so. His policy may be characterized as roughly anti-Novatianist or anti-puritan, and in Cyprian himself there was, as we have seen, an undertint of puritanism not invisible to Stephen, whose ruling that a lapsed or a perjured bishop might, without over severe conditions, resume his see, or even a Novatianist retain his, were strong anti-Novatianist examples of tolerance. But in fact he may be rather said to have inaugurated, or at least to have been an early type of the regular Roman policy of comprehension on easy terms saving as to the one article. of submission: ready in Spain to restore semi-pagans to the Episcopate; ready in Gaul to uphold the harshest repeller of penitents; ready anywhere to receive Marcionites without Baptism to Communion. And although the issue of his long severe Baptismal controversy with Cyprian has been determined by the Church catholic in Stephen's sense; although the practice 3 Ep. 75. 2, 6, 17.

1 Ep. 73. 7.

2 Ep. 72. I.

he maintained has been accepted as true wisdom and true charity; although Cyprian's theory has been rejected as well-nigh unchristian, yet few moral triumphs have equalled the ascendency of the vanquished Carthaginian. It arose solely upon the nobility of tone, the magnanimous gentleness, the postponement of self to the Church, in which he conducted his unhappy cause. The never broken veneration entertained for him is an answer to the calumny that theologians cannot forgive an opponent, or spare the memory of the defeated. It was the victorious Stephen who did not recover the shock of that conflict. While Cyprian and Cornelius are companion saints in Kalendar and Collect', beside the altar of the Catacomb' and in the mosaic heaven of the Basilica3, Stephen rested for centuries in the unpraised silence into which Pontius dismisses him. Not until in the ninth century a catacomb yielded a marble chair with an inscription over an unnamed martyr pope, did the church of Rome assign saintship to Stephanus' disengaged name. How he has lost both chair and legend again will be narrated hereafter.

Jeremy Taylor sets an uncharitable seal to the popular church view of his 'uncharitableness. Stephen was accounted a zealous and furious person". Still we need not forget that his portrait is made up of traits etched in scraps by the pen of an adversary, and that he was not solitary (as Florentius evinces) in his aversion to the power which Cyprian was now wielding". Dionysius the Great makes

1 Leonian Sacramentary, Muratori, Liturg. Rom. Vet. tom. I. col. 404; Gelasian Sacramentary, c. 668; Gelasian Kalendar, c. 49; Gregorian Sacramentary, t. II. c. 119; Gothic Missal, t. II. p. 629, an entirely different office for Cornelius and Cyprian, but still together. On the variations of the day here and in other rituals, see Appendix, p. 610.

2 See Rossi as above, pp. 302, 3. 3 As at Ravenna in S. Martinus in Cælo Aureo (afterwards S. Apollinare Nuovo).

4 Without mentioning Stephen he markedly proceeds 'Iam de Xysto bono et pacifico sacerdote.' Pont. Vit. c. 14.

5 Of Heresy 22, Liberty of Prophesying, vol. v. p. 396 (ed. Eden, 1853). Ep. 66 Florentio Puppiano.

6