sisting, and ended by eulogising the virtues and learning of Photius. This council is sometimes reckoned by the Orientals as the "Eighth Œcumenical Council," though generally only seven general councils are allowed in the East. Thus if an eighth is to be counted at all—and that is the case definitely in the Roman Church, though less decisively in the Greek—it is taken differently in the West and in the East. With the Latins it is Ignatius's council of a.d. 869; with the Greeks it is Photius's council of a.d. 879. The papal delegates assented to the decision of the latter council, and deceived the pope on their return to Rome by representing that it had conceded his Bulgarian claims. When he learnt the truth and discovered that it had done nothing of the kind, he pronounced an anathema on Photius for deceiving and degrading the Holy See. But it does not appear that the patriarch had had any share in the diplomacy which the papal legates had practised. Photius ended his days in learned leisure at a monastery, and died in the year 891. The feud between the two churches now went on and it only ended with final and complete severance.
4. The last stage of the long quarrel was concerned with the controversy on the Filioque clause of the Nicene Creed. The irony of history is nowhere more apparent than in the fact that the chief difference between the two great historic churches is so fine a point of doctrine that ordinary people could never guess its supposed importance. Nobody could pretend to decide it without penetrating into the profound mystery of the Being of God. Both churches accept the Nicene Creed as confirmed in the great Church councils; both are loyal to the idea of the homousion, and to the full Divinity of the Holy Spirit as well as that of the Son; both are thoroughly Trinitarian. But while the Eastern Church maintains that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone though through the Son, the Western Church contends that He proceeds from the Father and also from the Son as a joint source. Not only does the Greek Church object to the latter idea, it
