any permanent, living, personal head; no individual pontiff can speak in the name of the Church, or wield its power; that supreme prerogative belongs only to an Œcumenical Council. The Synod of Russia, the Patriarch of Constantinople, may censure or direct; their decisions are not infallible, nor are they binding beyond the limits of their own jurisdiction; even within them, personal opinions, individual consciences, are free, save in so far as the civil authority may lend its power to enforce the Church's decree. Recognizing no visible head, there has been no need of any local centre, of any Holy City, or of any spiritual monarch, vested, for his safeguard, with temporal power, and raised, as representative of divine right, by common consent of the faithful, above potentates and peoples.
As a consequence, nations following the Eastern creed have been spared the fierce and bloody struggles between Church and State which have devastated the West, but, as a further consequence, it has often happened that the State has encroached upon the Church, and made it subservient to its policy.
Decentralization has been characteristic of the Orthodox Church; it possesses unity of faith and of dogma without unity of government; it is modelled on the principle of nationalities, and is constituted of many national and independent establishments, auto-cephalous, each one having its own administration and language, and its peculiar rites, united only by the spiritual bond of a common belief; each one limited by the frontiers of its own country, and the extent of its jurisdiction measured by the territory of the State on which it depends. It is otherwise in the Catholic Church, where the constant tendency is to one centre, effacing more and more geographical separation and political boundaries, to claim universal dominion.
