enormously more prosperous Latin Patriarchate eventually seemed, if not the whole Church, at least its normal part.
Further, the discovery of new countries added again to the size of the Western half of the Church. Naturally, those countries were added to the Patriarchate to which the men who first colonized them belonged. If Greeks or Egyptians had discovered America, Australia, South Africa, these would have been added to some Eastern Patriarchate. But the people who built up these new lands were, and are, Latins, even if most of them are the rebel Latins we call Protestants. So the Roman Patriarchate received all the new lands too. The final result of all this is then that, considering the gradual stagnation of the East while the West was growing, considering the flood of Islam, the schisms which cut so many Easterns away from the Catholic Church altogether, and the discovery of new countries, the Roman Patriarchate has become so enormously the most important part of the Church that our Canon Law has acquired the habit of considering it as the normal situation for a Catholic to be a Latin. The Eastern rites appear rather as exceptions. It would be a monstrous delusion and the gravest injustice to our fellow-Catholics in the East to look upon them as in any way less Catholic than we are in the West. Nor have we the slightest right to expect them to join our Patriarchate, to accept our specifically Latin ideas or ways of doing things. They are, in every way, on the same plane in the Church as we are. They have just as much right to their customs and liturgies as we have to ours. The chief object of this book will be to show this. But the development of history does now suggest a primary distinction between Catholics of the vastly greater Latin Patriarchate and those of all the Eastern ones put together. Within the Church the Latins alone are about forty times as numerous as all Catholics of Eastern rites together. And this is only part of the general state of things by which the West has prospered while the East has decayed; so that the descendants of the men who thought our fathers contemptible now look to us as their guides in progress, and send their children to schools kept by Latins, to be taught our languages and European civilization.
Thus we have our first main division of Catholics into Latins on the one hand, and Uniates on the other. It ought to be unnecessary to say that this division implies no distinction of faith or of essential Christian law. All Catholics of any rite believe exactly the same faith, all obey the same final authority, that of the united Catholic hierarchy, of which the
