In 1721 Peter the Great placed the Church of Russia under the Holy Directing Synod, where it has since remained. As this Synod was never more than the shadow of the Czar, the Church of Holy Russia was for two centuries the most Erastian Christian organization that has ever existed. For during all this time the Holy Synod was as much under the domination of the Czar as any department of the imperial government. Added to this is the portentous fact that the Russian Church counts eight times as many communicants as all the other Orthodox Churches together. Even in the famous monastic republic of Mount Athos--a supposedly Greek community--where in 1902 there were seven thousand and five hundred monks, the majority were Slavs and nearly one-half were Russians. All this being the case, the Russians, who are fully as ambitious as were the Greeks in the time of Photius and Cerularius, are beginning to ask themselves whether the time has not arrived for the Holy Synod to assume the supreme headship of the entire Orthodox Church. Nor is the Phanar ignorant of the aspirations and purposes of the Holy Synod. It has read the writing on the wall and knows that as soon as the Russian Church shall find a leader with the towering ambition and intense national spirit of Photius, the fondly-entertained project of the Holy Synod will be quickly realized, that the primacy of the Orthodox Church will be transferred to Moscow or Petrograd, and that the power and the prestige of the Œcumenical Patriarch will then be little more than were those of his first predecessor when he was the humble suffragan of the Metropolitan of Heraclea. The Great Church--the official designation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople--will then have shared the fate of the Churches of Antioch and Alexandria which, in the days of their glory, were the rivals of the Mother Church of Imperial Rome. And then, too, will the aspiring Greeks be rudely wakened from the fantastic dream of their “Great Idea”--the idea of a great and reconstructed Hellas that shall embrace the Balkans and have as its capital the Queen City of the Bosphorus.