their members now. The ancient questions decided by Ephesus and Chalcedon are not the real issue. If they keep heretical formulas, refuse to acknowledge old councils, name heretics in their liturgies, it is because these things, like their hierarchies, languages, rites, are part of their Church, and their Church is their nation. Indeed, in some way they may be nearer to us than are the Orthodox. They went out so early that all that bitter later strife against the Papacy did not affect them.
That we have much to offer them, even from a lower point of view, is obvious. Reunion with the West would mean books, education, better training of their clergy, help and protection in many ways.[1] And there are better reasons for reunion than that. Why, then, do they refuse it? The one real reason is their national feeling. The Church is the nation, the only nation to those under the Turk. To this nation all cling with pathetic loyalty, all the more since they are ruled by a tyrant who is at once an infidel and a foreigner. They dread Latin advances as a threatened destruction of their nation. They conceive the Pope as a formidable monster who would make them all Latins. They think of the Uniates as merely a temporary compromise in his nefarious plans. He would, if he could, make all Eastern Christians Latins, swamp them in the mass of a vast foreign Church. Then the Copt would no longer be a Copt, the Armenian no longer an Armenian.
In spite of this, there is an element which makes for our cause, the growth of the Catholic ideal, as opposed to nationalism; namely, the increasing conviction that things are not right as they are, that what Christ founded was one visible united body of all his followers. They have this sense of a visible hierarchical Church already, each in his own body. Except in the case of a few (chiefly Armenians) who have read Protestant books, they have no idea of branch theories. If you tell a Jacobite that he, together with Nestorians, Orthodox, Papists and an indiscriminate collection of Protestant sects, is one Church, that the true faith of Christ is the greatest common measure of what all these believe, he will think, rightly, that you are talking nonsense. So
- ↑ I think no one who knows the Levant will dispute that the Uniate clergy are intellectually and morally above the others.
