CHAPTER II. THE EASTERN CHURCH AND ITS MISSIONS. Of the grandeur and dignity of the Eastern Church in the sixth century a modern student is tempted to think and to speak too highly. The ancient thrones of the patriarchs survive to-day, in the midst of persecution and neglect, and still men of lofty character, of learning and sanctity, preside over the great churches which they represent. The ancient liturgies still thrill the hearer with their immemorial dignity and pathos. And the West still bows to authority which came from the East. We recite her creeds, we condemn the heresies which she brought to light; and we may see in her to-day "the truest representative on earth of the old days of fathers and of councils." Many of the characteristics of her polity and her life that now strike us most were prominent in the sixth century; for her noblest boast is that she is ever the same. Yet both the extent of her dominion and the impressive dignity of her history are far greater now than they were thirteen centuries ago. Persecution and missionary effort have added just those qualities which she might seem then to lack. Still, in the sixth century, as now, the Holy Eastern Church claimed to be the defender of the faith and the guide of missionary effort. I. The first claim is that which is most prominent in the sixth century. The long 1 I quote the words of the great historian who loved Greece and knew her Church so well, Edward Augustus Freeman, Edinburgh Review, April, 1858. fight with monophysitism, the struggle with countless sects in the Oriental patriarchates, the definition and re-definition-the supremacy, in fact, of purely theological questions -that is the great feature of the Church history of this age. And it is a feature which it owes to the influence of the East. There is no infallible tribunal residing in a single person set up by the Church at this time the doctrine or dogma comes from the repeated arguments of doctors, stereotyped by the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils. The heresies arose in the East, and by the East they were condemned. Arianism came from Egypt, Nestorianism from Syria, Monophysitism flourished in the eastern provinces of the empire: and these heresies marked something of a political and racial divergence. As Constantinople more and more concentrated in itself the power of |