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of the Eastern Church during the first five centuries will ever claim the grateful respect of the whole Christian world; and its great teachers still live in their writings far beyond the confines, nay, even more outside of its communion, as the books of Moses and the Prophets are more studied and better understood among Christians than among Jews, for whom they wrote. But the Church has never materially progressed beyond the standpoint occupied in the fifth and sixth centuries. It has no proper middle age, and no Reformation, like Western Christendom. It influences the Churches of the West to-day chiefly through the Nicene and other creeds, its hymns made known by J. M. Neale and others, and the writings and examples of its great theologians, preachers, commentators, and historians of the first five centuries.

Three periods may be distinguished in the history of the Eastern Church: (1) The Classical or Productive period, the first five or six centuries, has just been characterized. The last great theologian of the East is John of Damascus (d. before 754), who summed up the scattered results of the labors of the preceding Fathers into a tolerably complete system of theology; but he is an isolated phenomenon. The process of degeneracy and stagnation

had already set in; and the former 2. Three life and vigor gave way to idle epecu-

formalism, and traditionalism. (2) The Byzantine period, corresponding to the Middle Ages of the Latin Church, extends from the rise of Mohammedanism to the fall of Constantinople (650-1453). Here are found the gradual separation from the West and from all progressive movements; dependence on the imperial court at Constantinople; continuation of a certain literary activity; philological and Biblical studies in slavish dependence on the Fathers; commentaries of CEcumenius (c. 990), Theophylact (d. after 1107), Euthymius Zigabenus (d. after 1118); large literary collections, classical and Christian, of Photius (c. 890), Balsamon, Zonaras, Suidae, and Simeon Metaphraetee; the liturgical works of Maximus, Sophronius, Simeon of Thessalonica; the Byzantine historians; the iconoclastic controversy (726-842; see InsAass AND IMAGE WORSHIP, II); inroads and conquests of Mohammedanism (from 630) in Syria, Persia, Egypt, North Africa; temporary suspension of the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem; finally, the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, and the extinction of the Greek Empire (1453), which led to the immigration of Greek scholars (Chatcondylas, Chrysoloras, Gemietoe Plethon, Michael Apostolius, Theodore Gaza, George of Trebizond, and others) to the West, the revival of letters, the study of the Greek Testament, and prepared the way for the Reformation. During this period of decline in its original home, the Greek Church made a great conquest in the conversion of the Slavonians (the Bulgarians and Russians) in the ninth and tenth centuries, while the Latin Church was converting the Celtic and Teutonic races.

(3) The Modern period may be dated from the downfall of the Greek Empire (1453). It presents in Asia stagnation and slavery under the rule of the IV.-4

Turks but great tenacity and independence as to all internal affairs; in Europe, rapid external growth through the rising power of Russia, with some reforms in manners and customs and the introduction of Western culture, protests against Romanizing and evangelical movements, the orthodox confession of Petrus Mogilas (1642), the Synod of Jerusalem (1672), the Russian Church, the patriarchate of Moscow, the reforms of Patriarch Nikon (d. 1681) and of the Czar Peter the Great (d. 172b), the reaction of the Old Believers (Reakolniki), the Holy Synod of St. Petersburg (since 1721), the New Greek Church in Hellaa (since 1833), with prospects for the future, depending chiefly on Russia.

In the history of the Eastern Church there have been no organized bloody tribunals of orthodoxy like the Spanish Inquisition, no sys$' Intol°r' tematic and long-continued pereecu-

No two Churches are so much alike in their creed, polity and cultus, as the Greek and Roman; and yet no two are such irreconcilable

Wsst. tant Church. They were never organically united. They differed from the beginning in nationality, language, and genius, as the ancient Greeks differed from the Romans; yet they grew up together, and stood shoulder to i shoulder in the ancient conflict with paganism and heresy. They cooperated in the early ecumenical councils, and adopted their doctrinal and ritual I decisions. But the removal of the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople by Diocletian and Constantine, the development of the papal monarchy in the West, and the establishment of a Western empire in connection with it, laid the foundation of a schism which has never been healed. The i controversy culminated in the rivalry between the ~ patriarch of Constantinople and the pope of Rome.