singularly extensive and defined. He has a practical veto on their appointment; appeal from all their acts lies to him; and they are to report themselves to him personally twice a year. It may be doubted whether any patriarch in the Roman Empire (except possibly the Patriarch of Alexandria) had so unquestioned, and so clearly defined, a sway over his diocese as the "Catholicos of the East." It is not surprising that the holder of it should soon have begun to use the term "patriarch" (though not dropping the title Catholicos), before the Christological controversy had separated him from the West, and long before it was the habitual and peculiar title of five special sees in the empire. This centralizing tendency is the fruit, as we have seen, of melet life, and is fostered, no doubt, by the natural Eastern attraction towards an autocracy; but it should also be noted that a force which retarded similar development in Asia Minor was absent in Persia. In the empire, if there was no provincial self-government, there was considerable municipal independence; and the tendency of the oriental to submit to authority—and of the greater sees to exalt themselves over the lesser—was counterbalanced, in a measure, by the fact that the bishop was a principal citizen of his own town as well as a subject of the Emperor, and a suffragan of Antioch or Constantinople.
One other tendency we see in the fathers of Seleucia which might well have spelt disaster for the Church had their circumstances allowed them to give way to it. This was the desire to rely on the State, the secular arm, even when that arm was non-Christian. The King decrees the supremacy of the Catholicos, the King will enforce the decrees of the council, and so on. Centuries of obstinate hostility, to their creed and to themselves, on the part of several successive rulers have not eradicated
