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because the violence of the dispute has been proportionate to the growth and power of the Greek Church. The first schism in the Christian Church arose, it is but natural to infer, as all schisms arise in party or state, from the belief of some one or more of its members, that they were examples of unappreciated talent, and that their claims to preferment were not duly recognized, joined to a desire for ecclesiastical promotion; - very rare is it that these ruptures spring originally from a radical difference of principles. The Christian religion first preached by the Apostles gradually spread from Asia to Europe, from Antioch to Rome, during the three hundred years immediately succeeding the death of Jesus. "The blood of the martyrs" really became "the seed of the Church." Persecution could not stay its growth, and the Pagan Emperors yielded to its power when Constantine the Great, at the head of the Roman Empire, became a convert to the teachings of Christ, and extended to them his patronage. In his time the direction of matters pertaining to the Church was given to five bishops, who inhabited the five citadels of the Christian religion, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria in the East, Rome in the West, and Constantinople, properly neither Western nor Eastern in geographical position, but Eastern in sympathies, because, when, forgetting the Saviour's teachings of unity, these five cities contended for the precedency, the primacy of the East was wrested from Alexandria and given to Constantinople. At a subsequent period this city, then second to Rome, was placed upon an equality with her in ecclesiastical power, and equality here, as often elsewhere, generated jealousy. The original grounds of difference between the Eastern and Western Churches, we see, were rivalry and vainglory. These once established, it remained for the patriarchs to find specious reasons for a separation, that should satisfy those who took no interest in their private jealousies. When the breach was in this way once made between the Greeks and Latins, quarrels among the pilgrims who assembled at the shrines of the East naturally followed.

Although, for a century and a half from Constantine's conversion, the limits of the separate jurisdictions of the two Churches were the grounds of continual disputes, still during this time there appear to have been only temporary suspensions of all communion between them, as, for example, when they would not hold intercommunion for a period of sixtyeight years, because they differed as to the contested succession to the patriarchate of Antioch. At the expiration of this hundred and fifty years, however, came the Council at Chalcedon, which, though it caused another temporary separation, finally put an end to all the dissensions of the Churches, and again, as in earlier times, the Greek and Latin pilgrims worshipped in harmony amid the scenes hallowed by the Saviour's life and sufferings. But the invasions of the Eastern patriarchates by the Persians under Chozroes, and the subsequent ravages of the Saracens and Turks, were more effectual in preserving the friendship which had just arisen anew between the Oriental and Occidental Churches, than were the canons of the Council at Chalcedon, although these for a time allayed all internal discord. There was no longer a question as to which of the two Christian Churches should have the custody of the shrines; the preservation and existence of these shrines were the subject in dispute. The infidels were at the gates of the Holy City; six-and-twenty thousand Jews, remembering their expulsion from Jerusalem in years gone by, were clamoring for vengeance; the pilgrims within the walls were like lambs before their shearers; Jerusalem was taken; the Holy Sepulchre and the churches of Helena and Constantine were destroyed; the Patriarch was carried away prisoner to Persia; the true cross became a trophy of the victors, and Jews and Arabs joined in a merciless massacre of all the Christian pilgrims. Nothing, however, can long restrain nations or sects which are determined to quarrel; with peace came discord. The worship of images, which was condemned by the Greeks while it was approved by the Latins, next revived the violence of their ecclesiastical

disputations; and even before this knotty question was settled, a second was agitated relative to the procession of the Holy Spirit, and to the insertion or omission in the creed of Constantinople of the words "Filio que." The Church of Spain in the fifth or sixth century had amended the formula of their creed, which before had read, "The Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from the Father," so that it stood, "which proceedeth from the Father and the Son." For a time this emendation, which was directed against Arianism, was disregarded by the Greeks, but when in the eighth century the French and German Churches received it, then the Easterns accused their opponents of heresy. For a hundred years "Filio que" involved the Christian world in a strife of words, and though the dispute was finally settled for the time by Pope Nicholas the First, yet to the present day it is a barrier to Papal and Oriental communion. If space would admit it, it would be profitless to enter into a detail of all the controversies (of which the foregoing is a fair specimen) which increased the breach between the two Churches from this time (800 A. D.) up to their final and lasting separation about the middle of the eleventh century. We cannot, however, pass by the Crusades, which, following soon after this separation, have direct reference to the subject in discussion, the Holy Places, since they gave to the Latins for the first time, by reason of their victories, exclusive possession of the shrines, which up to this period had been held by the Greeks. This possession, however, was destined to be of short duration, for when the tide of war changed, and the Crusaders were driven back to the West by the Mussulmans, then the Greeks regained their supremacy in the sanctuaries of the East. From that date to the present time the contest has been between the descendants of the Crusaders and those of the first Greek occupants, supported respectively by France and Russia. The custody of the Holy Shrines would now undoubtedly belong by right of conquest to the Turks, if they had never disposed of it by treaty to either of the great representatives of

the two religions. As it is, this custody belongs to France, for, being herself indifferent as to the dispute, excepting so far as it was conducive to her welfare to be on good terms with these two powerful nations, and seeing, as she thought, an opportunity of increasing that welfare, she gave up her right of control some three hundred years ago, when the Sultan Soliman placed, by treaty, the Holy Places and the Christians of Palestine under the protection of Francis the First of France; and this protection was reaffirmed in all treaties made by the two nations up to the first French Revolution. At this period France, forsaking the true God, forsook also his Eastern temples; and the Greek Church, by its proximity to the shrines, and the political power derived from Russia, regained their former custody of these places; but unjustly, for, if France relinquished her claims, they reverted as a matter of course to their original owners. The Eastern Question stood in this relation to Turkey, France, and Russia, when Louis Napoleon, for political, and not religious motives, demanded a complete recognition of his country's claims. What has transpired since this demand is too well known by every one, as a matter of history, to need to be mentioned here. However the present European war may affect, in its ultimate results, the question of the Holy Places, whether we be excluded from the Church of the Nativity or of the Holy Sepulchre, there will still remain to us "the Mount of Olives and the Sea of Galilee, the sky, the flowers, the trees, the fields, which suggested the Parables, -the holy hills, which cannot be moved, but stand fast for ever."

B. M. C.

sense.

THE MYSTIC.*

THE present reviewer got through with "The Mystic" by dint of perseverance and success in conquering all obstinate questionings of reason and impertinences of common What it is all about is more than he can say. During the perusal he could only give a friend who put Polonius's question, "What do you read, my lord?" Hamlet's reply, "Words, words, words." Should you ask the plot or plan of the poem, or rhapsody, or whatever else it may be, the needy Knife-grinder must furnish the answer: "Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir." Really, P. J. ought to be ashamed of himself. "Festus" is a great poem, and in spite of the apparently irreverent character of some passages in it, reminding of the scathing remark, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," has passed safely through the ordeal of adverse criticism, and now ranks among the poems which every collector of books desires to put earliest upon his shelves. And after this comes "The Mystic," — O what a fall was there!

A great deal of bitter language has been used about mysticism and obscurity in style, and often by those whose brains were the source of the defect rather than the writings they complained of. Accordingly, those who counted it not great excellence to write down to the meanest intellects, thinking such a course the best in the world for keeping their own intellects at a dead-lock, and for encouraging meanness of intellect to think itself judge and sovereign arbiter of all intellectual worth, have continued none the less to say what they had to say after their own fashion, without ransacking their brains for enigmatic expressions for low thoughts, and, on the other hand, without hammering out great thoughts and their new applications into the

*The Mystic and Other Poems. By PHILIP JAMES BAILEY, Author of "Festus." Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1856.

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