Historically, perhaps no church in the world has seen, at least in the Middle Ages, so many scenes that belonged to the deepest crises of national life. From the day when the great emperor who built it prostrated himself before God as unworthy to make the offering of so much beauty, to the day when Muhammad the conqueror (says the legend) rode in over the heaps of Christian dead, it was the centre, and the mirror, of the Church's life in the capital of the Empire. And that is what the worship of the East has always striven to express. It is immemorial, conservative beyond anything that the West can tolerate or conceive; but it belongs, in the present as in the past, to the closest thoughts, the most intimate experiences, of men to whom religion is indeed the guide of life. The Church of S. Sophia, the worship of the East, are the living memorials of the great age of the great Christian emperor and theologian of the sixth century. And the fact that this building was due to the genius and power not of the Church, but of Justinian, leads us back to the significance of the State authority in the ecclesiastical history of the East. As it was said in England that kings were the Church's nursing fathers, so in the Eastern Empire might the same text be used in rather a different {28} sense. The Church was in power before the Empire was Christian; but the Christian Empire was ever urgent to proclaim its attachment to the Church and to guarantee its protection. The imperial legislation of the great lawgiver began always in the name of the Lord, and the code emphasised as the foundation of society and civil law the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and of Christ. And step by step the great emperor endeavoured, in matters of morality and of gambling, to enforce the moral laws of the Church. Works of charity and mercy were undertaken by Church and State, hand in hand, and the noble buildings which marked the magnificent period of Byzantine architecture were the works of a society which, from the highest to the lowest member, was penetrated by Christian ideals. Thus, very briefly, we may epitomise the work of the first period we have mentioned. A word must be said later of later times. [1] Mansi, _Concilia_, ix. 384. The phrase was preserved in the Hymn '_O onogenes_, which was inserted in the Mass, and the composition of which is ascribed to Justinian himself. [2] Mansi, ix. 181. [3] Cf. Nicaea, Canon vi.; Constantinople, Canons ii. and iii.; Ephesus, Canon viii.; Chalcedon, Canons ix. and xvii. [4] Dr. W. Bright, _Waymarks in Church History_, p. 238. [5] See Hefele, _History of the Councils_ (Eng. trans.), iv. 311. [6] Given in Evagrius, v. 4. [7] A.D. 700, Mansi, _Concilia_, xii. 115. [8] See Gibbon, ed. J. B. Bury, vol. v. pp. 139, 140, 522, 523; and W. H. Hutton, _The Church of the Sixth Century_, pp. 204-240, 303-309. [9] Cf. Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, ii. pp. 396, 396, 399, etc. {29} CHAPTER III