ke a lofty mountainous
continent despising all the storms of an angry ocean around. She was
weak, because she was cut in pieces and had become like an archipelago
of small islands in a stormy ocean.

The Churches were not prepared to protest, they were prepared only to
surrender to any temporal power. Therefore, they surrendered altogether,
without making any effort, to Patriotism and Imperialism.

But what led to the Churches' surrender? It was through their internal
quarrels; through their fruitless controversies and paralysing mutual
accusations and self-sufficiency.

For instance:

The Eastern Church proudly insisted on her superiority over all other
Churches, because she preserved faithfully and unchangingly the most
ancient traditions of Christianity, and because she had an episcopal
decentralised system of Church administration, which has been capable of
adapting itself to all political and social situations. She reserved
perfection only for herself, and was prodigious in criticising other
Christian communities. She became an isolated island.

The Roman Church has had nothing to do with any other Church, living in
her isolation and raising higher and higher the walls which separated
her from other Churches. She has a wonderful record of missionary work
in Europe and outside; she has a minutely organised centralisation, with
an infallible autocrat at the head; and she has an enlarged dogmatic
system, larger than any other Church. She pointed out again and again
her superiority to all other Christian communities, and claimed for
herself the exclusive right to speak in the name of Jesus Christ. Thus
she became an isolated island.

The Anglican Church repudiated the papal authority. She repudiated as
well the Eastern worship of the saints and use of ikons on the one side,
and on the other she repudiated all the extremes of Protestantism in
teaching, worship and administration. She thought in that way to be the
absolutely true Christian organism, incomparably better than any other
all around. Thus the Anglican Church became an isolated island too.

The Protestants of the Continent, and of England and Scotland, thought
to save the Christian religion in its integrity by bringing it back to
its primitive simplicity. By repudiating the Pope and the Bishops, by
shortening the Christian dogmatic, and by reducing worship to a minimum,
they boasted of restoring the true Church of Christ and His Apostles.
Everything wh