Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/257

Rh Northern and Oriental races, especially the Sclavs and the Armenians and other peoples of Western Asia. Probably the Greeks were now a minority of the population of Greece, being outnumbered by the Sclavs. Constantinople ceased to be a Greek city except in language and culture. Her citizenship became more Oriental than Greek, and especially Armenian. The strongest rulers of this late Roman Empire which we call Byzantine were natives of Asia Minor. Thus the natural sympathies and affinities of the two branches of the Church tended century by century to mutual estrangement.

We saw how at the beginning the freer Christianity, the Pauline, that which was emancipated from Judaism, was Grecian. First and second century literature in Rome was composed in the Greek language. The churches of Lyons and Gaul were offshoots from the Greek colony at Marseilles, and their famous bishop Irenæus was a native of Greek-speaking Smyrna, who wrote his work Against Heretics in Greek. Latin Christian literature first appeared in north Africa a few years later. The great heresies of the Church nearly all sprang from the Eastern branch of the Church, and though at first they flowed to Rome and other Western places, by the middle of the fourth century they were successfully beaten back by the established hierarchial system of the West. The West had its schisms on questions of discipline—first the Novatian, then the Donatist, and its one great heresy, Pelagianism, which was concerned with the human side of religion. The East elaborated the orthodoxy of the Church. The Apostles' Creed grew up in the West, but as a schedule for catechetical teaching, probably originating in earlier Eastern schedules; the West, too—apparently in the monastery at Lerins—gave birth to the Athanasian Creed; but that is rather a hymn to be set by the side of the other great Latin psalm of praise, the Te Deum, not properly a Church creed at all. The one test creed is the Nicene, and this is Eastern. Its greatest exponents were in the East. During the fourth