The example of Greece was subsequently followed by the different states in the Balkans. For no sooner had they freed themselves from Turkish rule than they proclaimed their independence of the Œcumenical Patriarch. This Philetism--love of one’s race--in things ecclesiastical, which the various nations of southeastern Europe so conspicuously exhibited during the last century was a great blow to the Phanar, but it was this same kind of nationalism that was the chief cause of the Great Schism. Greece and Roumania, Serbia and Bulgaria, and Russia, long before any of them, had done nothing more than had the Orthodox Church when it separated itself from communion with Rome. It was in vain that the Phanar announced Philetism as a heresy. It was but the reassertion of the national idea which had led the Œcumenical Patriarch to rebel against the Pope--the construing of it into the principle _cujus regio ejus religio_ which met with such favor in the seventeenth century in Germany, according to which “each politically independent state should have an ecclesiastically independent church.” As a result of the frequent application of this principle the Orthodox Church has shared the fate that never fails to overtake schism and heresy. In consequence of political and ecclesiastical jealousies and antagonism; of excommunications and counter-excommunications by rival bishops; of divisions and subdivisions, the once great and powerful Orthodox Communion now finds itself divided into sixteen independent Churches whose jurisdiction ranges in extent from that of the Independent Church of the monastery of Mount Sinai to that of the once great Empire of Russia. There is now little left to the Patriarch of Constantinople but the primacy of honor, for he has no jurisdiction outside of his rapidly diminishing Patriarchate. Is there in all history a more striking case of poetic justice than that afforded by the gradual disintegration of the proud and ambitious Patriarchate of Constantinople? Although the retribution which has visited Cerularius and his successors is fearful to contemplate, stern Nemesis still pursues the Œcumenical Patriarchs with unrelenting severity. For now these unfortunate hierarchs are trembling under the Damoclean sword, which the vengeful goddess has put into the hands of Russia.