That question, which really involves the problem of the nature of human personality in which the present day is so much interested, was even more fruitful of controversy than the other. Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries it disturbed the Church.

In the mazes of these intellectual and philosophical problems the Eastern Church lost itself. It was rent by internal strife and patent schism. It lost the fine edge of its religious feeling and the concentration of its moral energy. That in spite of its intellectual superiority it was weak in moral and religious insight, when called upon to meet the onslaught of Islam the treatment of that religion by John of Damascus furnishes proof. He regards it simply as a kind of bastard Christianity, which is sufficiently refuted by the absurdities contained in the Qur'an, and the defects of its intellectual conception of God. For the dynamic force and moral passion of this new religion which was conquering the world around him he has no eyes at all.

It would, however, be one-sided to say that the weakness of the Church was due to the intrusion of Greek philosophy and speculation. It is not a defect in a Church that it is characterised by intellectual activity. Nor is what we call intellectualism in religion due to excess of intellectual activity so much as to its defect. The intellectual life of the Church in those centuries became more and more restricted by the twin forces of tradition and fanaticism. Dogma took the place of thought. The trouble lay not so much in intellectual activity and

speculation as in the impatience of the Church with any manifestation of independent thought on religious matters, and the haste with which it rushed to close the intellectual account by enforcing creeds upon hesitating brethren. No doubt this was to some extent due to State policy which aimed at a united Church. That gave opportunity to worldly, ambitious, and self-proud prelates to wield a power which they would not otherwise have had. But the root of the evil was the Church's own desire to live in bondage, and the determination of the parties within it that the type of bondage should be that which they approved. The Christians of those ages, proud in the possession of what they believed to be the truth, appear to have lost faith in the power of the truth ultimately to triumph over error, and the duty of love towards fellow-men, not to speak of fellow-Christians, was forgotten in the zeal for orthodoxy. The power of the secular arm being available to the party which held the upper hand, all parties were only too ready to call in the help of that power against their opponents when opportunity favoured them. The persecution of Christian by Christian, if less bloody, was if anything more bitter in spirit than the persecution of Christian by Pagan had formerly been.

Thus the speculations of theologians became the watchwords of party strife—the seals of orthodoxy, forcibly stamped upon many who little understood them. Those intricate questions as to the economy of the divine nature, and the relation of the divine and the human in Jesus