that Cyril who had murdered
Hypatia. Cyril was determined that the worship of the Virgin as the
Mother of God should be recognized, Nestor was determined that it should
not. In a sermon delivered in the metropolitan church at Constantinople,
he vindicated the attributes of the Eternal, the Almighty God. "And can
this God have a mother?" he exclaimed. In other sermons and writings,
he set forth with more precision his ideas that the Virgin should be
considered not as the Mother of God, but as the mother of the human
portion of Christ, that portion being as essentially distinct from the
divine as is a temple from its contained deity.

PERSECUTION AND DEATH OF NESTOR. Instigated by the monks of Alexandria,
the monks of Constantinople took up arms in behalf of "the Mother of
God." The quarrel rose to such a pitch that the emperor was constrained
to summon a council to meet at Ephesus. In the mean time Cyril had
given a bribe of many pounds of gold to the chief eunuch of the imperial
court, and had thereby obtained the influence of the emperor's sister.
"The holy virgin of the court of heaven thus found an ally of her own
sex in the holy virgin of the emperor's court." Cyril hastened to the
council, attended by a mob of men and women of the baser sort. He
at once assumed the presidency, and in the midst of a tumult had the
emperor's rescript read before the Syrian bishops could arrive. A single
day served to complete his triumph. All offers of accommodation on the
part of Nestor were refused, his explanations were not read, he was
condemned unheard. On the arrival of the Syrian ecclesiastics, a meeting
of protest was held by them. A riot, with much bloodshed, ensued in the
cathedral of St. John. Nestor was abandoned by the court, and eventually
exiled to an Egyptian oasis. His persecutors tormented him as long as
he lived, by every means in their power, and at his death gave out that
"his blasphemous tongue had been devoured by worms, and that from the
heats of an Egyptian desert he had escaped only into the hotter torments
of hell!"

The overthrow and punishment of Nestor, however, by no means destroyed
his opinions. He and his followers, insisting on the plain inference of
the last verse of the first chapter of St. Matthew, together with the
fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth verses of the thirteenth of the same gospel,
could never be brought to an acknowledgment of the perpetual virginity
of the new queen of heaven. Their phil