n crimes. "This we declare
to you, in virtue of our apostolic office, through special love for your
empire, that, as is fitting, and the Holy Spirit orders, obedience be
yielded to our warning, that every blessing may follow your government. Let
not your piety despise my frequent suggestion, having before your eyes the
words of our Lord, 'He who hears you, hears Me: and he who despises you,
despises Me: and he who despises Me, despises Him who sent Me'. In which
the Apostle agrees with our Saviour, saying, 'He who despises these things,
despises not man but God, who has given us His Holy Spirit'. Your breast is
the sanctuary of public happiness, that through your excellency, whom God
has ordered to rule on earth as His Vicar, not the resistance of hard pride
be offered to the evangelic and apostolic commands, but an obedience which
carries safety with it."

The Pope, then, standing alone in the world, and locally the subject of
Theodorick the Goth, makes the position of the Roman emperor in the world,
and the Pope in the Church, parallel to each other. Both are divine
legations. The Pope, speaking on divine things, claims obedience as
uttering the will of the Holy Spirit, which Pope Anastasius asserts, just
as Pope Clement I., five hundred years before, had asserted it, in the
first pastoral letter which we possess. He, living on sufferance in Rome,
asserts it to the despotic ruler of an immense empire, throned at
Constantinople, in reference to a bishop of Constantinople, whose name he
requires the emperor to erase from the sacred records of the Church as a
condition of communion with the Apostolic See.

This letter was directed to the East, the other belongs to the West, and
records an event which was to affect the whole temporal order of things in
that vast mass of territories already occupied by the northern tribes. On
Christmas day of the year 496, that is, one month after the accession of
Pope Anastasius, the haughty Sicambrian bent his head to receive the holy
oil from St. Remigius, to worship that which he had burnt, and to burn that
which he had worshipped. Clovis, chief of the Franks, and a number of his
warriors with him, were baptised in the name of the most holy Trinity,
never having been subject to the Arian heresy. Upon that event, the Holy
See no longer stood alone, and the ring of Arian heresy surrounding it was
broken for ever. The words of the Pope are these:

"Glorious son, we rejoice that your begi