o St. Peter. A firm
disciplinarian, not to say a persecutor, he had caused the
Priscillianists of Spain and the Manichees of Rome to feel his heavy
hand. A powerful rather than subtle theologian, he had asserted the
claims of Christian common-sense as against the endless refinements of
oriental speculation concerning the nature of the Son of God. Like an
able Roman general he had traced, in his letters on the Eutychian
controversy, the lines of the fortress in which the defenders of the
Catholic verity were thenceforward to intrench themselves and from which
they were to repel the assaults of Monophysites on the one hand and of
Nestorians on the other. These lines had been enthusiastically accepted
by the great council of Chalcedon--held in the year of Attila's Gaulish
campaign--and remain from that day to this the authoritative utterance
of the Church concerning the mysterious union of the Godhead and the
manhood in the person of Jesus Christ.

And all these gifts of will, of intellect, and of soul were employed by
Leo with undeviating constancy, with untired energy, in furthering his
great aim, the exaltation of the dignity of the popedom, the conversion
of the admitted primacy of the bishops of Rome into an absolute and
world-wide spiritual monarchy. Whatever our opinions may be as to the
influence of this spiritual monarchy on the happiness of the world, or
its congruity with the character of the Teacher in whose words it
professed to root itself, we cannot withhold a tribute of admiration for
the high temper of this Roman bishop, who in the ever-deepening
degradation of his country still despaired not, but had the courage and
endurance to work for a far-distant future, who, when the Roman was
becoming the common drudge and footstool of all nations, still
remembered the proud words "_Tu regere imperio populos, Romane,
memento!_" and under the very shadow of Attila and Genseric prepared for
the city of Romulus a new and spiritual dominion, vaster and more
enduring than any which had been won for her by Julius or by Hadrian.

Such were the two men who stood face to face in the summer of 452 upon
the plains of Lombardy. The barbarian King had all the material power in
his hand, and he was working but for a twelvemonth. The pontiff had no
power but in the world of intellect, and his fabric was to last fourteen
centuries. They met, as has been said, by the banks of the Mincio.
Jordanes tells us that it was "where the ri