Note 920 — Chapter IX · THE CLERGY AND MONKS.

“Si qua civitas potestate imperiali novata est aut innovatur, civiles dispositiones et publicas aecclesiasticarum quoque parochiarum ordines subsequantur.” Conc. Chalc. an. 451. This was an attempt to bring the state generally into that condition which would have existed had the church and the empire not been on terms of hostility when the church first was founded. Had the heathen creed not stood in the way, from the very first it is probable that the praefect of the city and the mayor of the village would have been universally also the Episcopus and Chorepiscopus of the community: but the χάρισμα κυβερνησέως and χάρισμα διδασκαλίας would not then have united in the same hands. The church assumed form and shape under pressure, and passed from a molluscous into a vertebrated organization through its struggles to resist persecution on the one hand and heresy on the other. When it entered into its alliance with the state its outward constitution was already completed. That alliance is not a metaphysical entity, but an historical fact.