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familiar Western division of Church History into three periods—the Patristic, the Mediæval, and the Modern—does not rightly apply to the Eastern half of Christendom. There were no Middle Ages in the Oriental Churches, for the simple reason that there was no Renaissance or Reformation to inaugurate a third period from which those ages could be sharply divided—no terminus ad quem. Nevertheless, other events roughly mark off a corresponding block of time. In the West the chief cause of the immense change that broke the classic traditions of the past and introduced mediævalism was the Teutonic flood of colonisation, before which half the Roman Empire crumbled away, and which ultimately issued in the shaping of the nations