Although the efforts to restore union which were made by Joachim III and Leo XIII were, apparently, completely ineffectual, there can be no doubt that they set people--both clergy and laity--to thinking, and that Church unity is now nearer realization than it has been for centuries. Thanks to more frequent communication between the East and the West, as well as to the all-powerful agency of the press, the people of the Eastern Churches are beginning to realize as never before the extent and magnitude of the frightful evils that have been engendered by the Erastianism and the Philetism which so dominate the Churches of Russia and the Balkans. They have learned that most of the hatred, dissensions, and race antagonisms which have so grieved and afflicted them may be traced to their lack of a central ecclesiastical authority and to the fact that their clergy have been forced to become mere tools of the government. Comparing their condition before the Great Schism with what it is now, they find to their sorrow that they are suffering from arrested development; that their boasted conservatism is but an euphemism for fossilization; that they have long ceased to be a living, active force, and that their only hope of regaining their erstwhile power and prestige is to become reunited with the Apostolic See. Those who were familiar with the history of the past will recall the days when the eminent saints and scholars Athanasius, Clement, and Cyril of Alexandria reflected such honor on the Church in Egypt; when St. John Damascene and St. Ephrem were the glory of Syria and Mesopotamia; when St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Gregory Nazianzen were the great intellectual luminaries of Asia Minor and the revered doctors of the entire Church of Christ. And pondering these facts it may occur to them that had Photius been less ambitious and more religious he might now be numbered not among sowers of scandal and schism-- _Seminator di scandalo e di scisma_[346] but among the great Fathers who were ever-zealous promoters of the good name and the sacred union of the Church Universal. They will also recall the disillusioning and disconcerting fact that since the very beginning of schism, the Eastern Church, to quote the words of Dean Stanley, “has produced hardly any permanent works of practical Christian benevolence. With very few exceptions, its celebrated names are invested with no stirring associations. It seems to open a field of interest to travelers and antiquarians, not to philosophers or historians.... As a rule there has arisen in the East no society like the Benedictines, held in honor wherever literature or civilization has spread; no charitable orders like the Sisters of Mercy, which carry light and peace into the darkest haunts of suffering humanity.”[347]