Leo, bishop of Rome, had come, on behalf of his
flock, to sue for peace from the idolater.
The two men who had thus at last met by the banks of the Mincio are
certainly the grandest figures whom the fifth century can show to us, at
any rate since Alaric vanished from the scene.
Attila we by this time know well enough; adequately to describe Pope Leo
I, we should have to travel too far into the region of ecclesiastical
history. Chosen pope in the year 440, he was now about half way through
his long pontificate, one of the few which have nearly rivalled the
twenty-five years traditionally assigned to St. Peter. A firm
disciplinarian, not to say a persecutor, he had caused the
Priscillianists of Spain and the Manichees of Rome to feel his heavy
hand. A powerful rather than subtle theologian, he had asserted the
claims of Christian common-sense as against the endless refinements of
oriental speculation concerning the nature of the Son of God. Like an
able Roman general he had traced, in his letters on the Eutychian
controversy, the lines of the fortress in which the defenders of the
Catholic verity were thenceforward to intrench themselves and from which
they were to repel the assaults of Monophysites on the one hand and of
Nestorians on the other.
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