he is not swamped in a Latin crowd. He keeps his own customs, laws, hierarchy, rites. A Uniate Armenian has not become a Chaldee nor a Latin. We do not ask the separated Churches to be Latin, but to be Uniate. St. Athanasius, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Gregory the Illuminator, were Uniates; their children will lose nothing worth having by being so too. What we hope for them is the growth of Catholic consciousness, a righter understanding of the ideal of their Master, who founded, not separated national Churches, but one fold and one shepherd.
But we Catholics, while we hope for their return to the one fold, owe them, even as things are, in spite of their schism, a feeling of brotherhood. Even outside the fold they are still our Lord's sheep, the other sheep who, please God, will one day hear his voice and be brought back. In a land ruled by Moslems there is at bottom an essential solidarity between all Christians. These other Christians too are children of God, baptized as we are. Their venerable hierarchies descend unbroken from the old Eastern Fathers, who are our Fathers too. When they stand at their liturgies they adore the same sacred Presence which sanctifies our altars, in their Communions they receive the Gift that we receive. And at least for one thing we must envy them, for the glory of that martyr's crown they have worn for over a thousand years. We can never forget that. During all those dark centuries there was not a Copt nor a Jacobite, not a Nestorian nor an Armenian, who could not have bought relief, ease, comfort, by denying Christ and turning Turk. I can think of nothing else like it in the world. These poor forgotten rayahs in their pathetic schisms for thirteen hundred years of often ghastly persecution kept their loyalty to Christ. And still for his name they bear patiently a servile state and the hatred of their tyrants. Shall we call them heretics and schismatics? They are martyrs and sons of martyrs. The long blood-stain which is their history must atone, more than atone, for their errors about Ephesus and Chalcedon. For who can doubt that when the end comes, when all men are judged, their glorious confession shall weigh heavier than their schism? Who can doubt that those unknown thousands and tens of thousands will earn forgiveness for errors of which they were hardly conscious,
