Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/30

2. The conversion of the Empire; and the Eastern Church.history of the Church is its conversion of the Empire; and, in close connection with this, its first wide sphere in the face of mankind, is the Oriental world, out of which it sprang, and in which the external forms of its early organization can still be most clearly studied. In Antioch, in Alexandria, in and around Constantinople, lie its most active heresies, its chief councils, its leading characters: and in the usages of the ancient systems which have grown up on that soil—Coptic, Greek, Nestorian, Russian—we may still trace the relics, the fossilized relics, of the old Imperial Church. But the stir of an onward movement soon ceases to be heard after the clatter and repose of its first victory. One only great convulsion has broken the stagnation Mahometanism.of the Eastern forms of Christianity—itself spurious, antagonistic, retrograde, yet a development, and reaction, out of those very forms. One great character has in later years burst out of those primeval seats of religion—call him Prophet, impostor, fanatic, reformer. Antichrist; yet Mahomet, and the religion of Mahomet, whether by way of contrast or resemblance, must always arrest the attention and demand the explanation of any true historian of the Church of Christ.

With the exception, however, of this one startling episode, this one rebound of the ancient Semitic fervour into the fold of the Gentile Churches, Eastern Christianity has but little to detain us. It contains only the second act of the drama; it