cumstances by which States are
established, and nations are distinguished from each other. Even Rome
had not so far extended her limits, nor so thoroughly subjugated and
amalgamated the races that obeyed her, as to secure the Church from the
natural reaction of national spirit against a religion which claimed a
universality beyond even that of the Imperial power. The first and most
terrible assault of ethnicism was in Persia, where Christianity appeared
as a Roman, and therefore a foreign and a hostile, system. As the Empire
gradually declined, and the nationalities, no longer oppressed beneath a
vigorous central force, began to revive, the heresies, by a natural
affinity, associated themselves with them. The Donatist schism, in which
no other country joined, was an attempt of the African people to
establish a separate national Church. Later on, the Egyptians adopted
the Monophysite heresy as the national faith, which has survived to this
day in the Coptic Church. In Armenia similar causes produced like
effects.

In the twelfth century--not, as is commonly supposed, in the time of
Photius and Cerularius, for religious communion continued to subsist
between the Latins and the Greeks at Constantinople till about the time
of Innocent III., but after the Crusades had embittered the antagonism
between East and West--another great national separation occurred. In
the Eastern Empire the communion with Rome was hateful to the two chief
authorities. The patriarch was ambitious to extend his own absolute
jurisdiction over the whole Empire, the emperor wished to increase that
power as the instrument of his own: out of this threefold combination of
interests sprang the Byzantine system. It was founded on the
ecclesiastical as well as civil despotism of the emperor, and on the
exclusive pride of the people in its nationality; that is, on those
things which are most essentially opposed to the Catholic spirit, and to
the nature of a universal Church. In consequence of the schism, the
sovereign became supreme over the canons of the Church and the laws of
the State; and to this imperial papacy the Archbishop of Thessalonica,
in the beginning of the fifteenth century, justly attributes the ruin
and degradation of the Empire. Like the Eastern schism, the schism of
the West in the fourteenth century arose from the predominance of
national interests in the Church: it proceeded from the endeavour to
convert the Holy See into a possession of