of tins council ; and finally, with the words, " Sancti Petri apostoli memoriam honore- mus," which represent the Roman bishop's right of review as an honorary matter. What Hefele urges against these arguments (i. 548 sq.), seems to me very insuffi- cient. 312 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. tion council in the neighboring town of Philippopolis ; and the city of Sardica, too, with the prsefecture of Illyricum, at that time belonged to the Western empire and the Roman patri- archate : it was not detached from them till 379. The council was intended, indeed, tp be ecumenical ; but it consisted at first of only a hundred and seventy bishops, and after the secession of the seventy-six orientals, it had only ninety four ; and even by the two hundred signatures of absent bishops, mostly Egyptian, to whom the acts were sent for their ap- proval, the East, and even the Latin Africa, with its three hundred bishoprics, were very feebly represented. It was not sanctioned by the emperor Constantius, and has by no subse- quent authority been declared ecumenical.' Accordingly its decrees soon fell into oblivion, and in the further course of the Arian controversy, and even throughout the Nestorian, where the bishops of Alexandria, and not those of Rome, were evi- dently at the head of the orthodox sentiment, they were utterly unnoticed.^ The general councils of 381, 451, and 680 knew nothing of such a supreme appellate tribunal, but unanimously enacted, that all ecclesiastical matters, without exception, should first be decided in the provincial councils, with the right of appeal— ^not to the bishop of Rome, but to the patriarch of the proper diocese. Rome alone did not forget the Sardican decrees, but built on this single precedent a universal right. Pope Zosimus, in the case of tlie deposed presbyter Apiarius of Si(5ca (a. d. 417-418),' made the significant mistake of taking the Sardican decrees for Nicene, and thus giving them greater weight than they really possessed ; but he was referred by the Africans to the genuine text of the Nicene canon. The later popes, however, transcended the Sardican decrees, withdrawing from the provincial council, according to the pseud o-Isidorian Decretals, the right of deposing a bishop, which had been ' Baronius, Natalis Alexander, and Mansi have endeavored indeed to establish for the council an ecumenical character, but in opposition to the weightiest ancient and modern authorities of the Catholic church. Comp. Hefele, i. 596 sqq. ° It is also to be observed, that the synodal letters, as well as the orthodox eccle- siastical writers of this and the succeeding age, which take notice of this council, like Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Basil, make no mention of those decrees concerning Rome. § 62. DECKEES OF COUNCILS ON PAPAL AUTHORITY. 313 allowed by Sardica, and vesting it, as a causa, major^ exclu- sively in themselves. Finally, in regard to the four great ecumenical councils, the first of Nice, the first of Constajst'itnople, that of Ephesus, and