Eastern Empire. In vain did such men as Chrysostom and Basil oppose
their personal influence to the hideous intrigues and villainies of
the Byzantine court; the ever-downward career of Eastern
Christianity went on unchecked for two more miserable centuries,
side by side with the upward development of the Western Church; and,
while the successors of the great Saint Gregory were converting and
civilising a new-born Europe, the Churches of the East were
vanishing before Mohammedan invaders, strong by living trust in that
living God, whom the Christians, while they hated and persecuted
each other for arguments about Him, were denying and blaspheming in
every action of their lives.

But at the period whereof this story treats, the Graeco-Eastern mind
was still in the middle of its great work. That wonderful
metaphysic subtlety, which, in phrases and definitions too often
unmeaning to our grosser intellect, saw the symbols of the most
important spiritual realities, and felt that on the distinction
between homoousios and homoiousios might hang the solution of the
whole problem of humanity, was set to battle in Alexandria, the
ancient stronghold of Greek philosophy, with the effete remains of
the very scientific thought to which it owed its extraordinary
culture. Monastic isolation from family and national duties
especially fitted the fathers of that period for the task, by giving
them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with a lifelong
earnestness impossible to the more social and practical Northern
mind. Our duty is, instead of sneering at them as pedantic
dreamers, to thank Heaven that men were found, just at the time when
they were wanted, to do for us what we could never have done for
ourselves; to leave to us, as a precious heirloom, bought most truly
with the lifeblood of their race, a metaphysic at once Christian and