preferred the Greek language, which was then the classic language of the East; and in spirit, also, they were thoroughly Oriental. In order to know this, we have only to examine the writings of Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and his famous pupil Origen. In some of these, such freedom is allowed to Oriental modes of philosophizing, as to distort the truths of the Gospel. We sometimes feel, while reading them, that they made the Persian philosophy a key to the Scriptures; that they subordinated the word of God to the dreams of a lawless fancy; that they engrafted the doctrines of Mithras and Manes upon the utterances of Jesus. They interpreted the Bible as no Western mind ever would have done. We trace, through their endless fantasies, the workings of Greek genius, culture, and associations. A Roman intellect would not have been so exuberant and tortuous. Its movements would have been steady and right onward, like the march of a cohort. Its style would have been rugged and warlike. Its imagery would not take us through gardens and seraglios, as does that of the early Christian fathers; but through camps, battle-fields, and the conflicts of the arena. It is important also here, to notice what new elements the church most readily united with, in its progress westward. Its Eastern spirit is everywhere made manifest. The early theologians had no sympathy with the Aristotelian philosophy. That school was thoroughly Occidental; and hence its influence was not felt within the church till after the ascendency of Western mind. But the philosophy of Plato had in it a vein of etherial, mys. tical speculation, suited to Oriental habits of thinking; and therefore it was embraced, and absorbed into the theology of the day, wherever it was encountered. It found a congenial home at Alexandria, and throughout the East; and was a

1 It is hardly necessary to give quotations confirming this statement. Justin Martyr taught that "Christ is the Logos (the reason or intelligence) of which all men participate; so that every one who has ever lived according to Loyos (reason) was a Christian." Origen believed in "the pre-existence of human souls, and their incarceration in material bodies, for offences committed in a former state of being." See Dr. Murdock's valuable notes to his translation of Mosheim, Vol. I. pp. 119, 168.

reigning power amid all the controversies of the day. Those heresies which distracted the early church, grew out of the vagaries of Asiatic mind. Docetism, which denied that Christ had a human nature; the Ebionites, who contended that the Redeemer's person was, in no respect, superhuman; Manicheism, which regarded God as the Ormuzd, and Satan as the Ahriman of Zoroaster; these errors show in what direction the speculations of the first Christians leaned.

It is indispensable that we should take this retrospect, in estimating the importance of the Greek church; and such a review of primitive Christianity discovers to us the hollowness of the great boast of Rome. She claims to be the true apostolic church, built on Peter and Christ; and denounces the Greek communion as heretical. Both parties had undoubtedly left the true faith, when their contentions began in the fourth century; but the external forms of religion which were reproduced in the Byzantine church, had become prevalent while Rome was as yet the stronghold of Paganism. The Eastern type of Christianity is much older than that which grew up, and finally overshadowed it, on Italian soil. We have, in the history of these two ecclesiastical bodies, an illustration of a very common fact. That which is oldest in reality may be youngest in name; and in religious contests often, as well as elsewhere, power wins the day against justice. That which is conservatism when judged by a human standard, not unfrequently turns out to be wild and wicked radicalism when tried by the eternal law of God. The river of divine truth, streaming from beneath the throne of God and the Lamb, appeared to men first amid the vineyards. and palm-trees of the East. As it flowed on toward the setting sun, Western elements began to mingle with it. Its Oriental characteristics were gradually overborne, and became almost imperceptible, after it was forced into the same channel with Roman aggression. Nor did those ancient traits show themselves again, till Constantinople had been

For a brief statement of the relation of Manicheism and kindred heresies to Oriental philosophy, the reader is referred to Milman's Hist. Lat. Christ. Vol. II. p. 322 et seq.

built.

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This was the headland. Here the Eastern mind in the church, turned back from its course, its constrained alliance with Western genius, and began to flow by itself again, in a more congenial channel. Two centres of attraction were now established: one possessing affinities for the Greek; the other, for the Latin Christians. The sevenhilled city on the Bosphorus, became the rival of the sevenhilled city on the banks of the Tiber. That branch of the vine which had been grafted upon a Western stock, still clung to old Rome; and that which had sprung from an Oriental root, turned instinctively to New Rome for sup port.

2

The way is now clear for us to trace some of those differences, between the Eastern and Western branches of the church, which resulted at last in their separation from each other. If we suppose those differences to be merely doctrinal, we shall find them ludicrously small as a ground of the conflict which the two communions have kept up for the last thousand years. We have only to visit Palestine, if we would see a specimen of the war which has been so long and relentlessly waged between the Greeks and Latins: the Latins still supported by the Southern powers, and the Greeks now by the great Northern power of Europe. Hardly a sacred locality can be found, which has not been fiercely contested by the two rival sects. Within the church of the Holy Sepulchre a struggle has been going on for generations; and that struggle has oftentimes been hot and deadly. "It would be a melancholy task," says a recent traveller, speaking of that edifice," to tell how the Latins procured a firman to stop the repairs of the dome by the Greeks; how, in the bloody conflicts of Easter, the English traveller was taunted

The seven hills, which, to the eyes of those who approach Constantinople, appear to rise above each other in beautiful order." — Gibbon.

2 Constantine actually bestowed this name on his new capital, at the ceremony of dedication. He was probably influenced by political motives in this, for he sought in all possible ways to associate with his city whatever might render it attractive to the Roman people. "Velut ipsius Romae filiam." They, notwithstanding, almost from the first called it after the name of its founder.

by the Latin monks with eating the bread of their convent and not fighting for them in the church; how, after the great fire of 1808, which fire itself the Latins charge to the amb'. tion of the Greeks, two years of time, and two-thirds of the cost of restoration, were consumed in the endeavors of each party, by bribes and litigations, to overrule and eject the others from the places they respectively occupied in the ancient arrangement of the churches; how each party regards the Turk as his best and only protector against the other."1. "Neither party," says the same thoughtful observer, "can ever forget that once the whole sanctuary was exclusively theirs; and, although France and Russia have doubtless pressed the claims of their respective churches from political or commercial motives, yet those claims themselves arise from the old conflict of the two great national churches of the East and West, here alone brought side by side within the same narrow territory. Once only besides has their controversy been waged in equal proximity, namely, when the Latin church, headed by Augustine, found itself in our own island (England), brought into abrupt collision with the customs and traditions of the Greeks, in the ancient British church founded by Eastern missionaries. What in the extreme West was decided once for all by a short and bloody struggle, in Palestine has dragged on its weary length for many centuries." 2

Slight indeed are the theological questions, around which this wearying strife has ebbed and flowed. The divergence of one party from the other, in their views of revealed truth, was but just perceptible at first. It would be hard for them now, to give a self-justifying account of their disputes, on any doctrinal grounds; or to show, in a satisfactory manner, for what vital truths of the Gospel they have fought each other, through ten centuries, with an enmity that has never cooled, to the constant shame of Christianity, and the frequent embroilment of more than half the world. Those disagreements in doctrine and forms of worship, such as they are, can be given in few words. And let it be re

1 Stanley's " "Sinai and Palestine," p. 458.

Ibid. pp. 457, 458.

membered that we state them as they now exist, after the struggles of many centuries, and not as they appeared at thetime when the division first occurred. Had the two parties remained together, and been identified in their interests and national spirit, these diversities in their religious belief would have disappeared long ago. At first they only thought they differed, and the wish was father to the thought; hence each party was on the watch for occasion to show that that thought was correct; and thus, after considerable effort, they succeeded in fomenting the quarrel they desired; and from that time forward they had no trouble in finding some object of contention. What we regard as the real causes of the strife, will be shown farther on. The natural workings of 'those causes would have made their doctrinal differences greater than we now find them, had not each party been kept on the same general ground of belief, by its desire to be regarded as in the true succession of the church of the apostles. They could not get far from each other, in their theoretical views, while it was the object of each to show that itself, rather than the other, still conformed to the ancient standards. They grew less orthodox as they became more powerful; and therefore we shall find that the Greek church, which has always been the weaker of the two, excepting for one short period, is much nearer than the Latin church to the scriptural basis. When the Romish hierarchy had no dangerous rival left, and beheld all Europe at its feet, it ventured to act out the spirit which had animated it from the beginning of the contest; and, throwing aside the Bible, it taught such dogmas as were best suited to its ambitious designs.

The disputes between the Greeks and Latins had been going on for centuries, before any doctrinal element was introduced into it. In the year 809, at a general council held in Aix-la-chapelle, the doctrine of the Procession of the Spirit came up. The Nicene council, whose authority the Greek Christians recognized, had decreed that the Spirit proceeds from the Father; but the council of Aix-la-chapelle, which was made up almost wholly of Western ele