Greek clergy, as if satiated with the endless
controversy of the incarnation, instilled a healing counsel into the
ear of the prince and people. They declared themselves monothelites,
(asserters of the unity of will,) but they treated the words as new,
the questions as superfluous; and recommended a religious silence as the
most agreeable to the prudence and charity of the gospel. This law of
silence was successively imposed by the _ecthesis_ or exposition
of Heraclius, the _type_ or model of his grandson Constans; and the
Imperial edicts were subscribed with alacrity or reluctance by the four
patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. But the
bishop and monks of Jerusalem sounded the alarm: in the language, or
even in the silence, of the Greeks, the Latin churches detected a
latent heresy: and the obedience of Pope Honorius to the commands of
his sovereign was retracted and censured by the bolder ignorance of his
successors. They condemned the execrable and abominable heresy of the
Monothelites, who revived the errors of Manes, Apollinaris, Eutyches,
&c.; they signed the sentence of excommunication on the tomb of St.
Peter; the ink was mingled with the sacramental wine, the blood of
Christ; and no ceremony was omitted that could fill the superstitious
mind with horror and affright. As the representative of the Western
church, Pope Martin and his Lateran synod anathematized the perfidious
and guilty silence of the Greeks: one hundred and five bishops of Italy,
for the most part the subjects of Constans, presumed to reprobate his
wicked _type_, and the impious _ecthesis_ of his grandfather; and to
confound the authors and their adherents with the twenty-one notorious
heretics, the apostates from the church, and the organs of the devil.
Such an insult under the tamest reign could not pass with impunity.
Pope Martin ended his days on the inhospitable shore of the Tauric
Chersonesus, and his oracle, the abbot Maximus, was inhumanly chastised
by the amputation of his tongue and his right hand. But the same
invincible spirit survived in their successors; and the triumph of the
Latins avenged their recent defeat, and obliterated the disgrace of the
three chapters. The synods of Rome were confirmed by the sixth general
council of Constantinople, in the palace and the presence of a new
Constantine, a descendant of Heraclius. The royal convert converted the
Byzantine pontiff and a majority of the bishops; the dis