not the first age, but the palmy days of the Byzantine Roman Empire. And that is their weakness. One can understand the Catholic ideal of a living Church, developing always under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, defining more closely each element of the old faith as the presence of some new heresy makes her more conscious of what she has hitherto held implicitly. One can understand the ideal of a man who will hear nothing of any development at all, who will allow no change, and who wishes to go back exactly to something that he believes to have been the state of the Apostolic Church. But why develop down to the year 787, and then rigidly refuse to move any further? What is the especial sanctity of the Byzantine world? Why accept and defend such innovations as the place of New Rome in the hierarchy and the independence of Cyprus, and then boast of one's unchanged antiquity? Why accept decrees of councils which define what was not defined before, and yet rail against any later definition as a Papal novelty?[1] They make so much of their ancient customs and venerable traditions: they think it so horrible a sacrilege even to discuss them. And yet they are not the customs of the age of Christ or the Apostles, they are only strangely fossilized remnants of the dead Empire. And so they satisfy no one. The Protestant thinks them as corrupt with their images, relics, vestments, and incense as any Papist; the Catholic thinks their Church dead and petrified. The radical affliction from which the Orthodox Church suffers is arrested development.
Summary.
The present faith of the Orthodox Church agrees in the very great majority of cases with ours. It is without comparison the Communion that stands nearest to the Catholic Church.
- ↑ It is no answer to say that it is only because the first seven councils really were œcumenical. There have always been heretics absent from councils. Has the true Orthodox Church lost the power of summoning a general council, or why has she let that power get atrophied for eleven centuries? And they are angry with many of our "novelties" in Canon Law as well as in faith, in spite of the enormous changes made by the founding of national Churches among them during the 19th century.
