members of the
great Christian confederacy. Throughout the length and breadth of
the Papal Commonwealth educated men had a common language, a common
literature, a common scientific method, and to a certain extent a common
jurisprudence. Western Christendom was thus all through the Middle Ages
not merely an abstract conception or a geographical expression: if not
a political, it was at least a religious and intellectual unit, and all
the countries of which it was composed benefited more or less by the
connection.

For centuries Russia stood outside of this religious and intellectual
confederation, for her Church connected her not with Rome, but with
Constantinople, and Papal Europe looked upon her as belonging to the
barbarous East. When the Mongol hosts swept over her plains, burnt her
towns and villages, and finally incorporated her into the great empire
of Genghis khan, the so-called Christian world took no interest in the
struggle except in so far as its own safety was threatened. And as
time wore on, the barriers which separated the two great sections of
Christendom became more and more formidable. The aggressive pretensions
and ambitious schemes of the Vatican produced in the Greek Orthodox
world a profound antipathy to the Roman Catholic Church and to Western
influence of every kind. So strong was this aversion that when the
nations of the West awakened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
from their intellectual lethargy and began to move forward on the path
of intellectual and material progress, Russia not only remained unmoved,
but looked on the new civilisation with suspicion and fear as a thing
heretical and accursed. We have here one of the chief reasons why
Russia, at the present day, is in many respects less civilised than the
nations of Western Europe.

But it is not merely in this negative way that the acceptance of
Christianity from Constantinople has affected the fate of Russia. The
Greek Church, whilst excluding Roman Catholic civilisation, exerted
at the same time a powerful positive influence on the historical
development of the nation.

The Church of the West inherited from old Rome something of that
logical, juridical, administrative spirit which had created the Roman
law, and something of that ambition and dogged, energetic perseverance
that had formed nearly the whole known world into a great centralised
empire. The Bishops of Rome early conceived the design of reconstructing
that old em