When Callistus had attained the object of his ambition, he tried to restore peace to the Church by endeavouring to persuade the advocates of the antagonistic principles to make mutual concessions.  Laying aside the reserve which he had hitherto maintained, he now took up an intermediate position, in the hope that both parties would accept his own theory of the Godhead.  “He invented,” says Hippolytus, “such a heresy as follows.  He said that the Word is the Son and is also the Father, being called by different names, but being one indivisible spirit; and that the Father is not one and the Son another (person), but that they both are one and the same....  The Father, having taken human flesh, deified it by uniting it to Himself,... and so he said that the Father had suffered with the Son.” [348:1]

Though Callistus, as well as Hippolytus, is recognised as a saint in the Romish Breviary, [348:2] it is thus certain that the bishop of Portus regarded the bishop of Rome as a schemer and a heretic.  It is equally clear that, at this period, all bishops were on a level of equality, for Hippolytus, though the pastor of a town in the neighbourhood of the chief city, did not acknowledge Callistus as his metropolitan.  The bishop of Portus describes himself as one of those who are “successors of the apostles, partakers with them of the same grace both of principal priesthood and doctorship, and reckoned among the guardians of the Church.” [348:3] Hippolytus testifies that Callistus was afraid of him, [348:4] and if both were members of the same synod, [348:5] well might the heterodox prelate stand in awe of a minister who possessed co-ordinate authority, with greater honesty and superior erudition.  But still, it is abundantly plain, from the admissions of the “Philosophumena,” that the bishop of Rome, in the time of the author of this treatise, was beginning to presume upon his position.  Hippolytus complains of his irregularity in receiving into his communion some who had been “cast out of the Church” of Portus “after judicial sentence.” [348:6] Had the bishop of the harbour of Rome been subject to the bishop of the capital, he would neither have expressed himself in such a style, nor preferred such an accusation.

Various circumstances indicate, as has already been suggested, that the bishop of Rome, in the time of the Antonines, was chosen by lot; but we may infer from the “Philosophumena” that, early in the third century, another mode of appointment had been adopted. [349:1] It is obvious that he now owed his advancement to the suffrages of the Church members, for Hippolytus hints very broadly that Callistus pursued a particular course with a view to promote his popularity and secure his election.  It is beyond doubt that, about A.D. 236, Fabian was chosen bishop of Rome by the votes of the whole brotherhood, and there is on record a minute account of certain extraordinary circumstances which signalised the occasion.  “When all