that it underwent no change at the resurrection. His professed object was not to minimise the actual sufferings of Christ, but, as he argued, to exalt our conception of the great condescension of One who was naturally not liable to suffering in willingly accepting it for the sake of the redemption of the world.
The discussion might have come and gone as an innocent pastime of the refugees, if it had not been for a high-handed act of interference in another quarter. As if he had not enough to occupy his attention in the great crisis of the empire brought on by his Gothic wars, Justinian, always ready to meddle in Church affairs, plunged into this new dispute. While under the influence of Theodora, on whom he doted with an uxorious husband's infatuation for a sprightly young wife, he had yielded concessions to the Monophysites; after her death (a.d. 548) he had treated them more coldly; but in his later days he had again begun to favour them. Julian's views represented extreme Monophysitism, and Justinian adopted those views. He went so far as to issue an elaborate statement affirming the incorruptibility of our Lord's body, which he required the bishops to accept. Here was an emperor's creed to be forced upon the Church by the power of the State, an intolerable piece of tyranny! If this were submitted to, it would be just to say that while the bishop of Rome was pope of the Western Church, the emperor was pope of the Eastern Church. In fact this action went beyond the normal papal pretensions. Even popes left it for councils to decide the creed of the Church; but Justinian was usurping the function of an œcumenical council. Moreover, he was doing this in face of an exceptionally divided ecclesiastical condition among his subjects. Not only was he siding with those whom the majority of his people regarded as heretics, but, in regard to a point on which those heretics were divided, he was taking a side, and that the side of the extremists. The emperor followed up his doctrinal statement with coercive measures; for a despot's requirement of a creed is an edict; it has
