Christianity, and Protestantism the Germanic, so Orthodoxy is the Slavonic.
There is a singular coincidence in the slight influence exercised by the Orthodox Church and the Slav race upon European civilization. Had they never existed their absence would have been hardly perceptible, whereas modern culture and development would be scarcely conceivable without Catholicism and Protestantism, or without the Latin and Germanic races.
The reasons for this striking inferiority, often and unjustly attributed solely to the Eastern Church, are manifold. Among them are, chiefly, the troubled, anxious political destinies of the nations acknowledging its sway; their isolated geographical situation, far from the centres of intellectual life; their position as forlorn hopes of European civilization and Christianity against barbaric and infidel invasion from Asia, and their religious, as well as their geographical separation from the rest of the civilized world, which was a consequence of the bitter hostility of Rome. Other reasons, of a secondary nature, may be traced to the different conceptions, in the East and in the West, of the mission and duty of the Church. The progressive element, and the gradual development of Christian truth, recognized by one communion, were ignored by the other. Rome admitted the principle of continual growth in religious knowledge, of constantly clearer manifestations of the faith, of further revelations of the sacred mysteries to be attained by study of the Word. To the Eastern theologian this idea was impious and damnable; for him the hour of discussion was closed by the decisions of the œcumenical councils anterior to the rupture between the Churches. The whole truth had been proclaimed, to which nothing could be added and nothing taken away. The limitations of the
