The decision of the council (which was apparently not challenged by Antioch, though it may conceivably have been not quite welcome there) did not make very much practical difference. Political reasons—that is to say, the impossibility of Persian subjects existing under the rule of any Roman prelate—had decreed the independence of the Persian Church. No oriental ruler who is strong enough to prevent it will have his rayats subject ecclesiastically to a foreign king, or a foreign king's subject; and just as Yezdegerd's firman had only formally declared the Catholicos and his melet to be that which they already were in fact, so this council declared formally an independence and supremacy which already really existed. Circumstances had previously made orientals welcome western interference: an interference which was not the assertion of a jurisdiction, but yet was something on which the assertion of a jurisdiction might be based if ever opportunity presented itself. It was a possibility that was repudiated rather than a fact. They now proclaimed the independence that was already theirs by right and custom, and declared their patriarch the supreme head of their branch of the Church.
The question now before us is: How did this independence, which was right and helpful, harden into the separation which we now see and deplore?
