by a swarm of worms; all his entrails fell out, and he tore his own flesh in a rage with his teeth, so that he was even buried in pieces. He was not altogether eight years on the throne when he died, and he had not even the satisfaction to leave the throne to his son Hilderic, for whom he had committed such slaughter in his family, because, according to the will of his father, Genseric, the crown descended to Guntamond, the son of his brother Genton; and he was succeeded, in 496, by Trasamond, who endeavoured to extirpate Catholicity totally in Africa, about the year 504. Among his other acts, he banished two hundred and twenty-four bishops, and among them was the glorious St. Fulgentius. On the death of Trasamond, in 523, he was succeeded by Hilderic, a prince, as Procopius writes, affable to his subjects, and of a mild disposition. This good King, Graveson tells us, was favourable to the Catholic religion, and he recalled St. Fulgentius and the other exiled bishops, and granted the free exercise of their religion to all the Catholics of his kingdom; but in the year 530, he was driven out of his kingdom by Glimere, an Arian, and then it was that the Emperor Justinian, to revenge his intimate friend, Hilderic, declared war against Glimere; and his general, Belisarius, having conquered Carthage and the principal cities, and subjected all Africa once more to the Roman Emperor, the Arians were banished, and the churches restored to the Catholics (10).

65. There were other persecutions by the Arians, after the death of Hunneric. Theodoric, King of Italy, and son of Theodomire, King of the Ostrogoths, was also an Arian, and persecuted the Catholics till his death, in the year 526. He ought, however, to be lauded for always keeping in his employment honest and learned ministers. One of them was the great Boetius, a man of profound learning, and a true Christian; but through the envy of his calumniators, he was cast into prison by his sovereign, and after being kept there a long time, was, at last, without being giving an opportunity of defending himself, put to death in horrible torments, his head being tied round with a cord, and that twisted till his eyes leaped out of their sockets. Thus died Boetius, the great prop of the faith in that age, in the year 524, and the fifty-fifth of his Theodoric likewise put to death Symmachus, a man of the highest character, in a most barbarous manner; and his crime was, that he was son-in-law to Boetius, and the tyrant dreaded that he would conspire against his kingdom. He also caused the death of the holy Pope John, in prison, by privations and starvation, and this holy man is venerated since in the Church as a martyr. Some inculpate this pontiff, for having induced the pious Emperor, Justin, to restore the churches to the Arians, but others deny his having done so. Cardinal Orsi says, that a great deal of obscurity

age.

(10) Fleury, Orsi, Nal. I. con.; Graveson, His. Eccles. t. 3, Procopius, l. 1, de Bellow.

hangs over the transactions of this age; but, taking the anonymous commentator on Valesius as a guide, he does not think that the Pope obtained the restitution to the Arians of all their churches, but only of such as they were already in possession of, or such as were deserted, and not consecrated; and that he did this only that Theodoric might rest satisfied with this arrangement, and leave the Catholics in possession of their churches, and not turn them out, and give them up to the Arians, as it was feared he would. But Noel Alexander, Baronius, and Orsi himself-and with these Berti agrees-say, with more likelihood, that St. John refused to solicit the Emperor, at all, for the restitution of the churches to the Arians, and that this is proved from his second epistle to the Italian bishops, in which he tells them, that he consecrated, and caused to be restored to the Catholics in the East, all the churches in possession of the Arians; and it was on that account that he was put into prison by Theodoric, on his return to Italy, and died there on the 27th of May, 526, worn out with sufferings.

66. Theodoric, not satisfied with those acts of tyranny, as the above-mentioned anonymous writer informs us, published an edict on the 26th of August, giving to the Arians all the Catholic churches; but God, at length, had pity on the faithful, and he removed him by a sudden death. A dreadful flux brought him to death's door in three days; and on the very Sunday in which his decree was to be put into execution, he lost his power and his life. A cotemporaneous historian gives a curious account of the beginning of his sickness. He was going to supper, and the head of a big fish was placed before him; he immediately imagined that he saw the head of Symmachus, whom he had a little before put to death, and that it threatened him with eyes of fury. He was dreadfully alarmed; and, seized with sudden terror, he took to his bed, and told his physician, Elpidius, what he imagined; he then regretted sincerely his cruelty to Boetius and Symmachus, and between agitation of mind, and the racking of his bowels, he was soon dead. St. Gregory writes, that a certain hermit, in the island of Lipari, saw him in a vision after his death, barefooted, and stripped of all his ornaments, between St. John and Symmachus, and that they brought him to the neighbouring volcano, and cast him into the burning crater.

67. Leovigild, King of the Visigoths, in Spain, was likewise an Arian; he had two sons by his first wife, Hermengild and Reccarede, and he married a second time, Goswind, the widow of another King of the Visigoths. He married his son Hermengild to Ingonda, who was a Catholic, and refused to allow herself to be baptized by the Arians, as her mother-in-law Goswind, herself an Arian, wished. Not being able to induce her, by fair means, to consent, Goswind seized her one day by the hair, threw her on the ground, kicked her, and covered her over with blood, and then

stripped her violently, and threw her into a fountain of water, to re-baptize her by force; but nothing could induce her to change her faith, and she even converted her husband Hermengild. When Leovigild heard this, he commenced a persecution against the Catholics; many were exiled, and their properties confiscated; others were beaten, imprisoned, and stoned to death, or put out of the way by other cruelties. Seven bishops were also banished, and the churches were deprived of their possessions. Hermengild was cast into prison by his father, and, at the festival of Easter, an Arian bishop came to give him communion, but he refused to receive it from his hand, and sent him off as a heretic; his father then sent the executioners to put him to death, and one of them split open his head with a hatchet. This took place in the year 586, and this holy prince has been since venerated as a martyr.

68. The impious Leovigild did not long survive his son; he deeply regretted having put him to death; and, as St. Gregory tells us, was convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion, but had not the grace to embrace it, as he dreaded the vengeance of his people. Fleury, nevertheless, quotes many authorities to prove that Leovigild spent a week before his death deploring the crimes he committed, and that he died a Catholic in the year 587, the eighteenth of his reign. He left the kingdom to his son Reccarede, who became a Catholic, and received the sacrament of Confirmation in the Catholic church; and such was his zeal for the faith, that he induced the Arian bishops, and the whole nation of the Visigoths, to embrace it, and deposed from his employment, and cashiered from his army, all heretics. The beginning of his reign was thus the end of the Arian heresy in Spain, where it reigned from the conquest of that country by the barbarians, an hundred and eighty years before, in the beginning of the fifth century; and when the Emperor Justinian, by the victories of Belisarius, became master of Africa, about the year 535 (chap. 4, No. 64), the Catholic faith was also re-established. The Burgundians, in Gaul, forsook the Arian heresy under the reign of Sigismund, the son and successor of King Gontaband, who died in 516. Sigismund was converted to the faith in 515, by St. Avitus, Bishop of Vienne. The Lombards in Italy abandoned Arianism, and embraced the Catholic faith under their King, Rimbert, in 660, and have since remained faithful to the Church. Danæus thus concludes his essay on the heresy of the Arians: "This dreadful hydra, the fruitful parent of so many evils, was then extinguished, but after the lapse of about nine hundred years, in about the year 1530, was again revived in .Poland and Transylvania, by modern Arians and Antitrinitarians, who, falling from bad to worse, have become far worse than the ancient Arians, and are confounded with Deists and Socinians" (11).

(11) Fleury, t. 5; Gregor. Jur. 9, t. 15; Danæus, Gen. Temp. not. p. 237.

ARTICLE III.

69-74. Heresy of Macedonius.

75-77. Of Apollinaris. 78. Of Elvidius. 79. Of Aetius. 80,81. The Messalians. 82. The Priscillianists. 83. Jovinians. 84. Other Heretics. 85. Of Audeus, in particular.

69. As Arius uttered blasphemies against the Son, so Macedonius had the temerity to speak blasphemously of the Holy Ghost. He was, at first, an Arian, and was deputed to the Council or Cabal of Tyre, as legate of the Emperor Constantius. He was then intruded by the Arians into the See of Constantinople, as Socrates informs us, though Paul, the lawful bishop, was then alive, and he received ordination at the hands of the Arians. A horrible circumstance occurred at his induction into the Metropolitan See. He went to take possession in a splendid chariot, accompanied, not by his clergy, but with the imperial Prefect by his side, and surrounded by a powerful body of armed troops, to strike terror into the people. An immense multitude was assembled, out of curiosity to see the pageant, and the throng was so great, that the church, streets, and squares were all choked up, and the new bishop could not proceed. The soldiers set about clearing the way; they first struck the people with the shafts of their spears, and whether it was by orders of the bishop, or through their own ferocity, they soon began to wound and kill the people, and trampled on the slain and fallen; the consequence was, that three thousand one hundred and fifty dead bodies lay stretched in gore in the street; the bishop passed through, and as his entrance to the episcopal throne was marked by blood and slaughter, so his future government of the See was distinguished for vengeance and cruelty. In the first place, he began to persecute the friends of Paul, his competitor in the See; he caused some of them to be publicly flogged, confiscated the property of others, more he banished, and he marked his hatred of one in particular by causing him to be branded on the forehead, to stamp him through life with a mark of infamy. Several authors even say that, after he had banished Paul from the See, he caused him to be strangled at Cucusus, the place of his exile (1).

70. His rage was not alone directed against the friends of Paul, but against all who professed the faith of the Council of Nice; the wretch made use of atrocious torments to oblige them to receive communion from him. He used, as Socrates informs us, to have their mouths forced open with a wooden tongs, and the consecrated particle forced on them, a punishment greater than death to the faithful. He used to take the children from their mothers, and have them most cruelly flogged in their mothers' presence; and the mothers themselves he used to torture by squeezing both their breasts under the lid of a heavy chest, and then caused them to be cut off with a sharp razor, or burned them with red coals, or with

(1) Bernin. t. 1; Coc. l. 1, c. 25; Danæus & Theod.

red-hot balls, and left them to die in prolonged tortures. As if it was not enough to torture and destroy the Catholics themselves in this manner, he vented his rage on their churches, which he destroyed to the very foundations, and the ruins he had scattered abroad.

71. One would think that these sacrilegious excesses were quite enough. But he was determined to do something more, and this was the last act he was permitted to perform as bishop. He had the audacity to disinter the body of Constantine, and transfer it from one tomb to another; but Constans could not stand this, so he ignominiously deposed him from the bishopric. While he was Bishop of Constantinople, he was only remarked for being a very bad man, and a Semi-Arian; but after his deposition, the diabolical ambition seized him, of becoming great in impiety, and the chief of a heresy; so, in the year 360, considering that preceding heresiarchs had directed their attacks against the Father and the Son, he determined to blaspheme the Third Person, the Holy Ghost. He, therefore, denied that the Holy Ghost was God, and taught that he was only a creature like the angels, but of a higher order.

72. Lambert Danæus says that Macedonius was deposed in the year 360, and was exiled to a place called Pilæ, where, in his old age, he paid the penalty of his crimes. But his heresy survived him: he had many followers, and the chief among them was Marantonius, Bishop of Nicomedia, and formerly his disciple, and, what was remarkable, he was distinguished for the regularity of his life, and was held in high esteem by the people. This heresy had many adherents in the monasteries of Monks, and among the people of Constantinople, but neither bishops nor churches till the reign of Arcadius, in the Arian domination. The Macedonians were principally scattered about Thrace, in Bithynia, along the Hellespont, and in all the cities of Cizica. They were, in general, people of moral lives, and observers of almost monastic regularity; they were usually called Pneumatomachi, from the Greek word signifying enemies of the Spirit (2).

73. The Macedonian heresy was condemned in several particular Councils. In the year 362, after the return of St. Athanasius, it was condemned in the Council of Alexandria; in 367, in a Council in Illyria; and in 373, in a Council held in Rome, by St. Damasus, for the condemnation of Apollinaris, whose heresy will be discussed presently. In the year 381, Macedonius was again condemned, in the Council of Constantinople (the first Constantinopolitan), and though only an hundred and fifty bishops were present, and these were all Orientals, this Council was recognized as a general one, by the authority of St. Damasus, and another Council of Bishops assembled in Rome immediately after, in 382. N. Alexander says:

(2) N. Alex. Bernin. t. 1, &c.