ia, the Holy Land, Asia Minor, and some parts of India, and
its adherents number ninety-six millions. We shall perhaps realize
still more strongly the havoc which this soul-destroying apostasy has
been suffered to work, if we remember that some of the countries where
it now reigns unchecked were formerly the seats of flourishing
Christian Churches, the Church in Africa boasting of such great Saints
as St. Cyprian and St. Augustine, whilst Palestine and Asia Minor
witnessed the first foundation of the Church, as well as its earliest
settlement in the form it was permanently to retain.

[1] It is from this Hegira (or Flight) of Mahomet, July 16th, A.D. 622,
that Mahometans compute their time.

[2] See Chap. VIII.

{94}

CHAPTER IX

The Division between East and West

A.D. 680-A.D. 1054

[Sidenote: Outward unity of the Church broken]

So far we have contemplated the Church of Christ as one in external
communion, no less than by the inner bonds of charity and of
sacramental life; but we now come to a period in which this external
unity began to be to a certain extent dissolved, and that in great
measure by the same outward influences which had at first secured its
cohesion. [Sidenote: with the breaking up of the Roman Empire.]
Heresies and schisms, especially the great heresy of Arius, had indeed
troubled the Church and threatened to break the visible union existing
between its branches in different countries; but it was not until after
the dissolution of the Roman empire that the breach really came.

Section I. _Jealousy between Rome and Constantinople._

[Sidenote: Reasons for Roman ascendancy.]

During the flourishing days of the empire the city of Rome had
naturally been looked up to with great reverence by all the other
Churches of the world. Its political importance as the centre of
government, the vast number {95} of its martyrs, its comparative
freedom from heresy, and its connexion with the lives and deaths of St.
Peter and St. Paul, all tended to give it a moral ascendancy which was
gradually claimed as a right. This, however, did not take place
without protests on the part of other Bishops, nor even without very
definite disclaimers of any wish for or right to supreme authority on
the part of the Bishops of Rome themselves.

[Sidenote: Ambition of an Eastern Patriarch.]

Constantinople, as being the new Rome and capital of the Eastern
empire, was especially jealous of the claims