And the fact that this building was due to the genius and power not of the Church, but of Justinian, leads us back to the significance of the State authority in the ecclesiastical history of the East.
As it was said in England that kings were the Church's nursing fathers, so in the Eastern Empire might the same text be used in rather a different {28} sense. The Church was in power before the Empire was Christian; but the Christian Empire was ever urgent to proclaim its attachment to the Church and to guarantee its protection. The imperial legislation of the great lawgiver began always in the name of the Lord, and the code emphasised as the foundation of society and civil law the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and of Christ. And step by step the great emperor endeavoured, in matters of morality and of gambling, to enforce the moral laws of the Church. Works of charity and mercy were undertaken by Church and State, hand in hand, and the noble buildings which marked the magnificent period of Byzantine architecture were the works of a society which, from the highest to the lowest member, was penetrated by Christian ideals. Thus, very briefly, we may epitomise the work of the first period we have mentioned. A word must be said later of later times.
[1] Mansi, Concilia, ix. 384. The phrase was preserved in the Hymn 'O onogenês, which was inserted in the Mass, and the composition of which is ascribed to Justinian himself.
[2] Mansi, ix. 181.
[3] Cf. Nicaea, Canon vi.; Constantinople, Canons ii. and iii.; Ephesus, Canon viii.; Chalcedon, Canons ix. and xvii.
[4] Dr. W. Bright, Waymarks in Church History, p. 238.
[5] See Hefele, History of the Councils (Eng. trans.), iv. 311.
[6] Given in Evagrius, v. 4.
[7] A.D. 700, Mansi, Concilia, xii. 115.
[8] See Gibbon, ed. J. B. Bury, vol. v. pp. 139, 140, 522, 523; and W. H. Hutton, The Church of the Sixth Century, pp. 204-240, 303-309.