There are few things in the history of the Church, which the lover of Christian Unity and peace finds more saddening than the clandestine intrigues and open antagonism that led to the Great Schism; few things that are more discreditable than the incessant machinations of those politicians and ecclesiastics who were the cause of all those fatal dissensions which were so characteristic of the Orthodox Church during the nineteenth century and have led to that widespread disintegration which, there is reason to fear, is just beginning. While one can have no sympathy with the authors of these disastrous schisms in the just retribution which has been meted out to them, one cannot help pitying the countless thousands among the clergy and laity who, in spite of the unpardonable scandals caused by Church and State are, nevertheless, earnestly striving to further the cause of Christ and to reflect in their lives the teaching of the gospel of their Redeemer. In Russia, in Greece, in Asia Minor--wherever the Orthodox Church still retains a hold on her children--one cannot help being edified by the piety, the zeal, the deep religious spirit of innumerable thousands who are not only ignorant of the cause of the schism that separates them from the Church of Rome but are also ignorant that they have even been in schism. Of those, however, who are acquainted with the origin of the Great Schism there are many who ardently hope and pray that it may soon be healed. For they have learned by long and sad experience the truth of the words of St. John Chrysostom who--with the possible exception of St. Gregory Nazienzen--was the most illustrious prelate who ever ruled the See of Constantinople: “Nothing can hurt the Church so much as love of power.”[343] REUNION OF THE EASTERN CHURCHES WITH THE HOLY SEE During my wanderings in the Near East, as during previous travels in Greece and Russia, a question of ever-absorbing interest to me was that of the long-desired and often-attempted reunion of the Eastern Churches with the Church of Rome. When I contemplated the majestic temples of Petrograd with their surging multitudes of pious worshipers and examined the stately convents and monasteries of Moscow with their vast number of devoted, God-fearing inmates; when I marveled at the shiploads of Russian pilgrims who at great expense and with great discomfort annually visited the Holy Land and noted the sumptuous hospices and shrines that their government has there erected for them; when I beheld the desecrated temples of Hellas and Anatolia and recalled how the Greeks, during long centuries of oppression and degradation--when they had everything to gain by apostasy--preserved intact the faith of the Orthodox Church and augmented that vast army of martyrs who sealed their belief in Christ with their blood--when I saw and recollected all this, there was the ever-recurrent question, “Will the fateful schism of a thousand years ever be healed?”