✓ which are 'spiritual cemeteries', and they wish to return to sincerity by departing from Christianity openly, while retaining their pastoral office in the Evangelical Church. In Germany the diminution of candidates for the Protestant ministry has been enormous, in Holland it has for some time been necessary to supplement the ranks of the ministers from the Dutch in South Africa. Other points also deserve our serious attention. One is that during the earlier years of this century statistics abundantly proved that throughout Germany the proportion both of illegitimate births and of suicides was higher in the Protestant districts than in the Roman Catholic districts.1 The sense of moral obligation is weaker where the sense of submission to divine truth is weaker, and 'Modern Protestantism' has pulverized what Luther broke. As a spiritual force Protestantism on the Continent is quite ineffective in opposing Rome. That is not merely because bands of irregular troops are no match for a highly disciplined army. The reason lies far deeper. It is that there are everywhere considerable numbers of people who realize that a Church keeping the original Gospels, even with an Italian Pope, provides us with an infinitely better religion than a school which offers us selections from a New Testament expurgated by mutually hostile professors. I have ventured to speak strongly about some existing corruptions in the Church of Rome. But, having so spoken, I say that the meanest Roman chapel in England is nearer to God than the finest temple where they preach any sham German Jesus.

And this is closely connected with something to which I would finally draw your attention. We have in England Arthur Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency, vol. i, p. 241 (Longmans, London, 1906).

• The weakness of Protestantism in Holland as a political and social force is shown by the Dutch Parliamentary elections of July 1922. Roman Catholics had 30 per cent. of the votes cast and secured thirty-two of the one hundred seats in the Second Chamber, thereby gaining political supremacy.

been repeatedly told by those who have lately introduced into this country the precise arguments which Germans have employed in undermining the faith of their fellow countrymen in various articles of the creed and in Christ himself, that their work is one of restatement and reconstruction, the clearing away of temporary misinterpretations, the strengthening of conviction as to the real message of our Lord. In view of these repeated assertions, whatever degree of sincerity they possess, it will not be amiss to quote the words of a German professor who cannot with propriety be treated as a nobody in the intellectual world, Professor Ernst Troeltsch. He sees quite clearly that the crucial thing in the difference between the Old and the New Protestantism is the question of Christology. What is now left of Christ is said to be His 'originality and spiritual creative power'. The rest is gone. With a candour which leaves nothing to be desired Troeltsch says, ' From this alteration in the central point of the system the most profound results issue, the old Christological dogma and myth are set aside, the doctrine of the Trinity and vicarious satisfaction are destroyed or rendered uncertain, the roots of the idea of the sacraments and the Church are plucked up, and direct communion with the Bible rendered difficult '.1

That is Modern Protestantism'.

Is there anything harsh or illiberal in our saying that to describe such an alteration as a 'restatement' or 'reconstruction', or even as a 'readjustment' in theology, is a grave misuse of language, and that such a religion is ' after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ'?

1 Die Kultur der Gegenwart, 'Die christliche Religion', pp. 446, 447 (Teubner, Berlin und Leipzig, 1905).

VII

THE EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCH

Rev. ii. 13: I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith.

ON July the 16th, 1054, three papal legates walked through the congregation assembled in the great church of the Holy Wisdom at Constantinople, past the columns of porphyry under the domes of gold mosaic and the great wings and faces of the angels, through the jewelled screen, and placed upon the altar a bull excommunicating Michael Caerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople. If on the one hand the bull contained statements which were both abusive and false, yet on the other the conduct of the Patriarch had been arrogant and provocative.

During the darkest times of the Papacy the eastern Emperors with singular skill had strengthened their hold upon the provinces of Southern Italy. It was their policy to make the country once again a Magna Graecia. In Calabria eight bishops were made dependent upon the Greek Archbishop of Santa Severina, and five sees were placed under the Greek metropolitan of Otranto. Large numbers of eastern monks settled in the country, also acting as the apostles of Hellenism. The Greek language was widespread, and the Greek rite took such deep root that in some parishes it survived until the fifteenth century and even to the end of the sixteenth.1 Rome did not prohibit, and does not now prohibit, the Byzantine rite, and in the monastery of Grottaferrata within sight of Rome it has lasted until the present day. But Michael Caerularius

1 See app. note 23, p. 277.

would show no tolerance to the churches of the Latin rite in Constantinople.

The question of doctrine was entirely in the background. The points at issue were matters of ceremonial, not so very different from the matters that caused bitter controversies and even imprisonments in England in the nineteenth century. Michael, who observed the Eastern custom of consecrating leavened bread for the Eucharist, had a strong dislike of the Western custom, alluded to in England by the Venerable Bede, of consecrating bread that was unleavened. Both customs are very ancient, both are possibly apostolic, and in the ninth century Photius, the learned Eastern protagonist and opponent of Rome, wisely left the matter in silence. Michael also disliked the old Roman custom of fasting on a Saturday, an innocent practice which probably arose in imitation of the fast before the Easter communion, and was a a means of preparing for the weekly communion which Bede also mentions as surviving in Rome in his day. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Michael intended to provoke a crisis in order to show that he repudiated the Roman claim to primacy. The Pope, Leo IX, who died before the legates excommunicated Michael, made that claim, a claim which the Oecumenical Councils allowed. But in stating it he put Constantinople, no doubt of set purpose, lowest in the list of patriarchates, in spite of the Second Oecumenical Council having placed it second only to 'Old Rome'. If we may lawfully pass judgement on the rivals, we can hardly hesitate to call the malice of Michael more culpable than the pride of Leo.

The papal legates had not excommunicated the Eastern Church as a whole, and some time elapsed before the width and the permanence of the schism were understood. But all subsequent attempts at union failed and the doctrine of papal infallibility has now made the vision of unity seem

only a mirage in the desert. The schism between the East and the West brought its punishment in limiting the knowledge and the sympathies of both parties. In the West all intercourse with the Greeks, and a knowledge of the atmosphere in which early Christianity had developed, became delayed until the fifteenth century. The isolation of the Pope from the other patriarchs of the Church prepared for his autocracy and in the end for the dogma of his infallibility; and this autocracy led to that explosion of individualism and failure to recognize the corporate life of the whole Church which have been so common in Protestant Christianity. In fact it is hard to deny that there is considerable truth in the Russian view that Rome and Protestantism represent different aspects of one and the same fundamental error, the exaltation of the individual at the expense of the body of which he is a member. Nor can we fail to regret that the conviction that the Eastern Church is schismatical and heretical has caused Latin Christendom lavishly to spend men and money in making proselytes from Orthodoxy, when the same resources might have been devoted to the conversion of the enemies of the Cross.

Isolation from the West has in turn affected the East. The great stores of western theological and devotional literature remained almost unknown. Little was done to develop the more active side of monastic life, or, in modern times, of parochial life. Wherever possible a dignified worship and the strict observance of fasts and festivals were maintained; but the schism having originated with small outward things, a strange importance was attached to such matters as the kind of bread used in the Eucharist or the precise manner of making the sign of the Cross. Conservatism prevented the use of instrumental music in church, and the introduction of images as distinguished from sacred pictures. The short and simple service of low mass, apparently introduced in the West as early