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 THE CONDITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE IN IL'OO. 201 velopmcnt to ^vbicll the men of the AVest were ahiiost alto- gether strangers. The interest, too, which the great mass of the popuhition took in the discussion of reh'gioiis questions shows an intelligence which, entertained by men possessed of the acuteness of Greek thinkers, must in all likelihood have led to a great religious movement for reform of doctrine that would have amounted to an Eastern reformation, which would probably have profoundly modified AV^estern Christian- ity, had circumstances allowed it to be developed. In former times religious questions had occasioned infinite Absence of discussiou in Constantinople. In the twelfth cen- tdSnai"'°* t^^T the popular interest in such discussions had questious. altogether ceased. The period in question had not, in the East at least, given rise to any special religious or in- tellectual movement. The disputes which had raged in the early Church, and which had been continued by the Blues and Greens, by many an heretical sect, and by those who took part in the Iconoclast controversy, had died out, and were represented either by what to most men had already become incomprehensible articles of faith, or by persecuted sects banished into the mountains of the peninsula or the recesses of Asia Minor, where, like the Paulicians, they were destined to linger on for centuries longer. During the eight long centuries between Constantino and the thirteenth century there had been burning controversies, in which the city had displayed an intellectual life and activity, a popular interest in abstract questions as keen and as vivid as that shown by the inhabitants of London during the time of Charles the First, and not less eloquently than justly pointed to by Mil- ton as a proof of a quick and bold spirit among his country- men. Eeligious belief was understood to have been settled for all time. The centuries which were to bring inquiry and doubt had not yet dawned. The Church was part of the established order of things. Eeligion was one of the in- stitutions over which the emperor presided almost as abso- lutely as over law. No inquiry into the subject was neces- sary. It had been decreed by the emperor as had law, and had even a higher, and if possible a more indisputable, au-