in the period before us. The Roman bishop claims, that the four dignities of bishop, metropolitan, patriarch, and pope or primate of the whole church, are united in himself. The first three offices must be granted him in all historical justice ; the last is denied him by the Greek church, and by the Evangelical, and by all non- Catholic sects. His bishopric is the city of Rome, with its cathedral church of St. John Lateran, which bears over its main entrance the inscription : OmniuTn urbis et orVis ecdesiarum mater et caput / VOL. II. — 19 290 THIRD PERIOD, A.D. 311-590. thus remarkably outranking even tke church of St. Peter — as if Peter after all were not the first and highest apostle, and had to yield at last to the superiority of John, the representa- tive of the ideal church of the future. Tradition says that the emperor Constantine erected this basilica by the side of the old Lateran palace, which had come down from heathen times, and gave the palace to Pope S^dvester ; and it re- mauied the residence of the popes and the place of assembly for their councils (the Lateran councils) till after the exile of Avignon, when they took up their abode in the Vatican beside the ancient church of St. Peter, As metropolitan or archbishop, the bishop of Pome had immediate jurisdiction over the seven suffragan bishops, after- ward called cai'dinal bishops, of the vicinity : Ostia, Portus, Silva Candida, Sabina, Prseneste, Tusculum, and Albanum. As patriarch, he rightfully stood on equal footing with the four patriarchs of the East, but had a much larger district and the primacy of honor. The name is here of no account, since the fact stands fast. The Roman bishops called themselves not patriarchs, but popes, tliat they might rise the sooner above their colleagues ; for the one name denotes oligarchical power, the other, monarchical,. But in the Eastern church and among modern Catholic historians the designation is also quite currently applied to Pome. The Roman patriarchal circuit primarily embraced the ten suburban provinces, as they were called, which were under the political jurisdiction of the Roman deputy, the Yicarius Urbis ; including the greater part of Central Italy, all Upper Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.' In its ' Concil. Nicsen. of 325, can. 6, in the Latin version of Rufiuus (Ilist. Eccl. x. 6) : "Et ut apud Alexandriam et in urbe Roma vetusta consuetudo servetur, ut vel ille JEgypti, vel hie suburbicariarum ecclesiarum sollicitudinem gerat." The words suburb, eccl. are wanting in the Greek original, and are a Latin definition of the patriarchal diocese of Rome at the end of the fourth century. Since the seventeenth century they have given rise to a long controversy among the learned. The jurist Gothofredus and liis friend Salmasius limited the regioHes suburbicarice to the small province of the Pnefectus Urbis, i. e. to the city of Rome with the immediate vicini-