3 18
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
religion which claimed a universality beyond even that of the Imperial po\ver. The first and most terrible assault of ethnicism was in Persia, where Christianity appeared as a Roman, and therefore a foreign and a hostile, system. As the Empire gradually declined, and the nationalities, no longer oppressed beneath a vigorous central force, began to revive, the heresies, by a natural affinity, associ- ated thetTIselves \vith them. The Donatist schism, in which no other country joined, was an atteITIpt of the African people to establish a separate national Church. Later on, the Egyptians adopted the Monophysite heresy as the national faith, which has survived to ,this day in the Coptic Church. In ATmenia similar causes produced like effects. In the twelfth century-not, as is commonly supposed, in the time of Photius and Cerularius, for religious com- munion continued to subsist between the Latins and the Greeks at Constantinople till about the time of Innocent IlL, but after the Crusades had embittered the antagonism bet\veen East and \Vest-another great national separa- tion occurred. In the Eastern Empire the cOITImunion with Rome was hateful to the two chief authorities. The patriarch was ambitious to extend his own absolute juris- diction over the whole Empire, the emperor wished to increase that po\ver as the instrument of his own: out of this threefold combination of interests sprang the Byzan- tine system. I t was founded on the ecclesiastical as well as civil despotism of the emperor, and on the exclusive pride of the people in its nationality; that is, on those things \vhich are most essentially opposed to the Catholic spirit, and to the nature of a universal Church. In con- sequence of the schism, the sovereign became supreme over the canons of the Church and the laws of the State; and to this imperial papacy the Archbishop of Thessa- lonica, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, justly attributes the ruin and degradation of the Empire. Like the Eastern schism, the schism of the West in the four- teenth century arose from the predominance of national interests in the Church: it proceeded from the endeavour
