subject cannot compare with those which Mr. Gore's predecessors have
handled. The great Pontiff, indeed, who met Attila and turned him from his purpose of attacking Rome, is a striking per- sonage. So is the Bishop who did So much to consolidate the power of the Metropolitan Soo. Still, ho remains something of an abstraction to us. He is a great ecclesiastic, but nothing more. We do not know him as we know Chrysostom and Augustine. His life is such as that of a public man would be whose biography should be written with no other material than that supplied by his proceedings in Parliament
and his despatches. To us, the most interesting thing is Leo's claim to supremacy. For a great saint, he seems to us to have come very close to heresy :—" The position asserted for Peter among the other Apostles is not merely that of ' first among equals,' or even of a superior among iuferiors,—it' is something generically different ; he is a mediator between Christ and the other Apostles ; he is the only immediate recipient of sacerdotal grace, and what the others receive they receive through him. Leo seems to shrink, not unnaturally, from calling Peter the head, from whose life the members live ; but lie calls him a head,—a kind of head, from or through which alone grace is derived for the limbs." If these
utterances are infallible, "separation from Rome," as Mr. Gore re- marks, " is Reparation from grace, and therefore from Christ."
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