Only those who have traveled in the Near East and studied there the aspirations of its peoples can fully realize the intense national feeling of the Eastern Churches. Similarly only those who have carefully studied the history of these various ecclesiastical bodies can duly appreciate their present attitude toward the great Latin Church of the West and understand that remarkable conservatism which has ever been one of their most striking characteristics. The truth is that in all the Eastern Churches--especially the Armenian--national loyalty and national pride count for more than religious conviction or dogmatic teaching. This, strange as it may appear, means that the nation comes before the Church; that politics takes precedence of theology. To envisage the State as separated from the Church, politics as distinct from religion, as we do in the West, is as alien to a Syrian or an Armenian patriot as it is to a Persian mollah or an Ottoman grand vizier. For this reason the Eastern Churches, like the theocratic government of Islam to which they have so long been subject, have always attributed so paramount an importance to everything that specially bears on their national life and character. And they have been confirmed in this view by their age-long treatment by the Sublime Porte which, in organizing its Christian subjects, made religion the basis of their nationality. Thus the Armenian Church was made _Ermeni Millet_--the Armenian Nation; the Orthodox Church, regarded as inheriting the name of the Roman Empire, became _Rum Millet_--the Roman nation--while Catholics of the Latin rite are known as _Latin Millet_--the Latin Nation. And so it was with the Churches of Egypt, Syria, Mount Lebanon, and the various other Christian Churches in the vast dominions of the Ottoman Sultan.[331] From the foregoing it is seen that among Eastern Christians it is not their particular church that counts so much as their _millet_. This, although quite an artificial nation, is as dear to them as our fatherland is to us, while in comparison all matters of dogma and theology are quite secondary. For this reason it is that there are rarely any conversions from one Eastern Church to another. And for this reason, too, it is that--as has well been observed--“for a Jacobite to turn Orthodox would be like a Frenchman turning German.” This loyalty of the schismatic Christians in the East to the traditions and national spirit of their forebears explains the exceptional conservatism of the divers Churches to which they belong--the tenacity with which through the ages they have clung to their particular rites and customs and retained unchanged their special liturgies since schism first separated them from their mother Church. And it is this intense conservatism, this undying loyalty to their _millet_ that constitutes the greatest barrier to the reunion of the Eastern Churches with the primatial Church of Rome.