Note 13 — III.

A remark of Mr. Finlay’s is worth quoting here. ‘The Greeks,’ he says, ‘had at times only a secondary share in the ecclesiastical controversies in the Eastern Church, though the circumstance of these controversies having been carried on in the Greek language has made the natives of Western Europe attribute them to a philosophic, speculative, and polemic spirit, inherent in the Hellenic mind. A very slight examination of history is sufficient to prove that several of the heresies which disturbed the Eastern Church had their origin in the more profound religious ideas of the oriental nations, and that many of the opinions called heretical were in a great measure expressions of the mental nationality of the Syrians, Armenians, Egyptians, and Persians, and had no conception whatever with the Greek mind.’—Byzantine Empire, from 716 to 1057, p. 262.

The same writer (p. 263) remarks very truly, that ‘the religious or theological portion of Popery, as a section of the Christian Church, is really Greek; and it is only the ecclesiastical, political, and theoretic peculiarities of the fabric which can be considered as the work of the Latin Church.’