Cartas y sermones (incluido el Tomo a Flaviano)

oftenest hitherto in the Eastern) portion of His Church. Politically, intellectually, and theologically the period in which this great character grew up, lived and worked, was one of transition: the Roman Empire, learning and thought, paganism were each alike at the last gasp, and neither in Church nor State was there any other at all of Leo's caliber. This consideration will account for the wonderful influence, partly for good and partly for bad, which his master-mind and will was permitted to exercise on the after-ages of Christendom. During his early manhood the Pelagian controversy was raging, and it is thought that the acolyte name Leo, whom Augustine mentions in his letters on this subject as employed by pope Zosimus to carry communications between Rome and the African church, is the future Pope. Under Celestine, who was pope from 422 to 432, he was archedeacon of Rome, and he seems already to have made a name for himself: for Cassian, the Gallican writer whom he had urged to write a work on the Incarnation, in yielding to his suggestion, calls him "the ornament of the Roman Church and of the Divine ministry," and S. Cyril (in 431, the date of the Council of Ephesus) appeals to Leo (as Leo has himself recorded in Letter CXIX., chap. 4) to procure the pope's support in stopping the ambitious designs of Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem. Under the next pope, Sixtus (432-440), we hear of him in Prosper' s Chronicon (under the year 439) again in connexion with Pelagianism: he seems to have stirred up the vigilance of the pope against the crafty designs of one Julius of Eclanum, who, having been deprived of his bishopric for holding that heresy, was attempting to be restored without full proof of orthodoxy.