Council, that it is difficult to understand how men who claim to be in earnest have ever contested it.
Under the reign of Justinian II. there assembled at Constantinople two hundred and eleven bishops, of whom the four Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were the chief.[1] This assembly is known under the title of the Council in Trullo, because it was assembled under the Trullus or dome of the imperial palace. Its object was to add to the acts of the fifth and sixth œcumenical councils, which had not made any disciplinary rules. Church discipline was alone discussed. Customs widely different already prevailed in the Eastern and Western churches, particularly in regard to the marriage of priests. The Roman Church even then was drifting toward ecclesiastical celibacy as a general law. The Eastern Church, on the contrary, solemnly proclaimed the ancient law respecting marriage of priests, deacons, and sub-deacons. Rome, therefore, refused to receive the laws of the Council in Trullo. This embittered the antagonism already existing between Rome and Constantinople. In thus disavowing ancient discipline, and refusing to subscribe to canons, which were its exact expression, she was laying the groundwork of that wall of separation which was so soon to be raised between the two churches. It was Pope Sergius (692) who refused to admit the canons of the Council in Trullo. He particularly relied upon this, that the council prescribed to the Roman Church, to change her practice regarding the Saturday fiist, a practice that she had followed from time immemorial. Some zealous Romans, like the priest Blastus, had tried as early as the fifth century to impose the Roman custom upon the whole Church; at the close of the seventh century the East undertook to impose hers upon Rome. It must be granted that a council of
- ↑ See the transactions of this council in Labbe's Collection, vol. vi.
