The Eastern Church, since the Council of Nicæa, had organized itself with an episcopal constitution, at the head of which stood the Katholikos of Ctesiphon, and with councils, liturgy, and law of its own. In 486 the Nestorian doctrine was accepted as binding, and the tie with Constantinople was thus broken. From that point on, Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians have a common destiny, of which the seed was sown in the Gnosis of Bardesanes. In the Monophysite Churches of the South, the spirit of the primitive Community emerged again and spread itself further; with its uncompromising monotheism and its hatred of images its closest affinity was with Talmudic Judaism, and its old battle-cry of εἷς θεός had already marked it to be, with that Judaism, the starting-point of Islam (“Allah il Allah”). The Western Church continued to be bound up with the fate of the Roman Empire--that is, the cult-Church became the State. Gradually it absorbed into itself the adherents of the Pagan Church, and thenceforth its importance lay not so much in itself--for Islam almost annihilated it--but in the accident that it was _from it_ that the young peoples of the Western Culture received the Christian system as the basis for a new creation,[457] receiving it, moreover, in the Latin guise of the extreme West--which for the Greek Church itself was unmeaning, since Rome was now a Greek city, and the Latin language was far more truly at home in Africa and Gaul. The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this World’s Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example. Of these mighty facts Western theologians and historians give an entirely false picture. All that their gaze, riveted upon the Mediterranean lands, observes is the Western direction that fits in with their “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” schema, and even within these limits, accepting the ostensible unity of Christianity, they regard it as passing at a certain period from a Greek into a Latin form, whereby the Greek residue is lost sight of altogether.