first used against Athanasius, and next afterwards for the ruin of Chrysostom, though it has since been made a pillar of the faith.  Pistus was not appointed to the vacant see.  The council chose Gregory of Cappadocia as a better agent for the rough work to be done.  Athanasius was expelled by the apostate prefect Philagrius, and Gregory installed by military violence in his place.  Scenes of outrage were enacted all over Egypt.

[Sidenote:  Athanasius and Marcellus at Rome.]

Athanasius fled to Rome.  Thither also came Marcellus of Ancyra, and ejected clerics from all parts of the East.  Under the rule of Constans they might meet with justice.  Bishop Julius at once took the position of an arbiter of Christendom.  He received the fugitives with a decent reserve, and invited the Eusebians to the council they had already asked him to hold.  For a long time there came no answer from the East.  The old heretic Carpones appeared at Rome on Gregory’s behalf, but the envoys of Julius were detained at Antioch till January 340, and at last dismissed with an unmannerly reply.  After some further delay, a synod of about fifty bishops met at Rome the following autumn.  The cases were examined, Marcellus and Athanasius acquitted, and it remained for Julius to report their decision to the Easterns.

[Sidenote:  The letter of Julius.]

His letter is one of the ablest documents of the entire controversy.  Nothing can be better than the calm and high judicial tone in which he lays open every excuse of the Eusebians.  He was surprised, he says, to receive so discourteous an answer to his letter.  But what was their grievance?  If it was his invitation to a synod, they could not have much confidence in their cause.  Even the great council of Nicaea had decided (and not without the will of God) that the acts of one synod might be revised by another.  Their own envoys had asked him to hold a council, and the men who set aside the decisions of Nicaea by using the services of heretics like Secundus, Pistus and Carpones could hardly claim finality for their own doings at Tyre.  Their complaint that he had given them too short a notice would have been reasonable if the appointed day had found them on the road to Rome.  ’But this also, beloved, is only an excuse.’  They had detained his envoys for months at Antioch, and plainly did not mean to come.  As for the reception of Athanasius, it was neither lightly nor unjustly done.  The Eusebian letters against him were inconsistent, for no two of them ever told the same story; and they were, moreover, contradicted by letters in his favour from Egypt and elsewhere.  The accused had come to Rome when summoned, and waited for them eighteen months in vain, whereas the Eusebians had uncanonically appointed an utter stranger in his place at Alexandria, and sent him with a guard of soldiers all the way from Antioch to disturb the peace of Egypt with horrible outrages.  With regard to Marcellus, he had denied