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OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
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ranks and unified their public confession of Faith[1]. But what I have brought before you to-day from the works of Aphraates shews clearly that there was no inner unity between East and West. In the East the theology of S. Athanasius and S. Basil was a foreign graft, not a genuine natural growth: it is therefore not surprising that the Syriac-speaking Church broke away hardly a single generation after an orthodox Emperor was seated on the throne. The mass of the Orientals, especially those more distant from Constantinople and Antioch, became Nestorian; and those who remained soon found that their position also was untenable. It was impossible for the barbarians to remain at peace with the Greeks: the Church was divided, and the way paved for the triumph of Islam.

  1. See Hort's Two Dissertations, pp. 128—133.