endeavoured to make others think them out.

From 527, in the East, Church history may be said to start on new
lines. The Catholic definition was completed and the imperial power
was definitely committed to it. We may now look at the Orthodox Church
as one, united against outside error.

{12}

A period of critical interest in the history of Europe is that to which
belongs the difficult and complicated Church history of the East from
the accession of the Emperor Justinian to the death of S. Methodius.

The period naturally divides itself into three parts--the first, from
527 to 628, dealing with the Church at the height of its authority, up
to the overthrow of the Persian power; the second to 725, the period up
to the beginning of the iconoclastic controversy; and the third up to
its close and the death of S. Methodius in 847. With the first we will
deal in the present chapter.

[Sidenote: Church and State in the East.]

But throughout the whole three centuries, from 527 to 847, the
essential character of the Church's life in the east is the same. In
the East the Church was regarded more decisively than in the West as
the complement of the State. Constantine had taught men to look for
the officials of the Church side by side with those of the civil power.
At Constantinople was the centre of an official Christianity, which
recognised the powers that be as ordained of God in a way which was
never found at Rome. At Rome the bishops came to be political leaders,
to plot against governments, to found a political power of their own.
At Constantinople the patriarchs, recognised as such by the Emperor and
Senate of the New Rome, sought not to intrude themselves into a sphere
outside their religious calling, but developed their claims, in their
own sphere, side by side with those of the State; and their example was
followed in the Churches which began to look to Constantinople for
guidance. There was a necessary consequence of this. {13} [Sidenote:
Nationalism of the Churches.] It was that when the nationalities of the
East,--in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, or even in Mesopotamia--began to
resent the rule of the Empire, and struggled to express a patriotism of
their own, they sought to express it also on the ecclesiastical side,
in revolt from the Church which ruled as a complement to the civil
power. Heresy came to be a sort of patriotism in religion. And while
there was this of evil, it was not evil that each new barb