the discussion of the subjects before the public mind we often witness great intellectual acumen, and a profound religious spirit. Able and pious men anxiously sought to reconcile faith in the unity of the Divine, with faith in the intimate oneness between the Divine and the human manifested in the life of Christ. No age is dishonoured by keen interest in that theme. [Illustration: SHOEMAKER, STAMBOUL His business plant consists of an awning propped up against the wall of a fountain and a few broken-down old stools.] On the other hand, these discussions sometimes degenerated into idle debate, and displayed some of the most odious feelings of human nature. And Constantinople laid itself open to the well-known satirical description of its theological bias by Gregory of Nyssa. “The city is full of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of money for you, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was made out of nothing.” Under Theodosius II., the interest taken by the citizens of Constantinople in theological controversy was all the greater, inasmuch as the points at issue were raised by religious teachers in the capital itself; one of the heretics being no less a personage than Nestorius, the patriarch of the city. He denied the propriety of the epithet, Theotokos, Mother of God, commonly bestowed upon the Mother of our Lord. A great controversy followed, in which all classes of society, from the Emperor and his family to the monks and populace, took part, and displayed, as usual in such cases, a spirit unworthy of the Christian name. So great was the commotion caused by the questions in dispute, that two General Councils of the Church--that of Ephesus in 431, and that of Chalcedon in 451--were convened to affirm the orthodox faith, if not to restore peace. And thus for some twenty years people in Constantinople had all the theology they could wish to discuss. One result of these religious troubles was to evoke the latent antagonism between the different races which composed the population of the Empire. Under the guise of religious differences, national diversities asserted themselves. Rome and Constantinople, the West and the East, did not learn to love each other better in the heat of such debates. While from the Council of Ephesus and the Council of Chalcedon, the Armenian Church and the Coptic Church date, respectively, their separation from the main body of Christendom. The extent to which religious and political aspirations are associated in the minds of the populations of the modern East casts much light upon the formation of different Churches along national lines in the earlier days of the Christian world, and also