is also a very human passion, and one that exists to-day in a slightly different form. We do not tear one another to pieces in the twentieth century over the matter of an iota in the creed; but we have seen quarrels over points of geology or archæology, or the question whether A, or B, was the first to reach a wholly conventional point of the world's surface; and these problems are surely at least as remote from practical importance as the question whether the central figure of a man's religion is or is not a proper object of worship. Man was then, and is still, a highly combative animal.
Further, under the Roman Empire religion was politics. Putting the military and civil services aside, the Church, and the politics of the Church, offered to the ordinary man the one real carrière ouverte in which he could rise to importance locally or even imperially. All that his Church, and his office in it, means to the member of an oriental melet to-day, it meant then; with this addition — that a man of power in the Church had the opportunity of using his talents, not merely in an institution that Government despised, but in the one institution that the Emperor could not despise. All that political life and its struggles mean to a constitutional country to-day was meant by ecclesiastical politics and struggles to a Roman subject of the fifth century; and interest was as real and keen in one as in the other.
Next, the theological strife of the period was the expression, not only of politics, but of nationality, and of a national feeling consciously opposed to the Government policy. In the empire religion and the Church tended rapidly, during the fifth and sixth centuries, to become instruments of government in a despotism that tended more and more toward what is suggested to us by the name Byzan-
