De mon côté, j’ajouterai une seule considération, qui je crois n’a été faite par aucun de ceux qui se
existed, but which are merely known to be still extant, to be published shortly ? To judge from the contents of the forty-three volumes extracted by the late Cardinal Mai from the recesses of the Vatican, one of his principal achievements in life seems to have been that of having commenced the process of rehabilitating the Greeks in their controversy with the Latins, and in particular of doing justice to Photius. Certain it is that bis late eminence inaugurated a new way of speaking of him very different from what had ever been heard in Rome before, since the schism. Fresh from the task of preparing for the press for the first time two of the most consummate, but long-lost, treatises of his : ‘I am amazed,’ he exclaims, ‘to think how Photius, suddenly elevated to the episcopate from being a layman, incessantly distracted with secular cares and avocations, could have acquired so profound a knowledge of the holy Scriptures, and of theology of the highest kind.’ He might well say so ; for the whole violence of the controversy which ensued on the deepest of subjects has for the last 1,000 years been spent upon Photius, without adding a word in reality to what he said on it the instant it came before him officially :
Then what a world of bitterness is proved against his opponents by his distinguished editor in establishing so irrefragably that the fable of pope Joan must have been a contemporary fiction originating in the hatred of the Latin party for the memory of John VIII., not because his theology was defective, or his life immoral, or his rule arbitrary, but solely because he had the courage, the manliness, to appreciate the abilities and desire to cultivate the friendship of the great patriarch, his brofher.
Lastly, what a mine of wealth is disclosed by the late librarian of the Vatican, in attempting to disprove the genuineness of the celebrated letter of John to Photius on the procession, because he could discover no copy of it in the secret correspondence of a pope who
