In the eastern Carpathians an interesting compromise was reached in the seventeenth century by the recognition of the Uniate Church acknowledging the Pope, but keeping a Slavonic ritual. The persecution of that church by Romanizers in Poland and by the Byzantine Church of Russia is a great difficulty at the present time, but it should be understood that the Roman Church does not dispute the validity of Byzantine orders of {71} priesthood and sacraments, so that the difference between Roman and Greek Christianity does not cut so deep as that between the Roman Church and western schismatics, such as Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, and so on. On the other hand, very important divergences have grown up in organization between the two churches in ways which deeply affect the life of the people. The western church, based upon the Roman Empire, has had its waves of enthusiasm in the early Middle Ages and during the Counter-Reformation for the unity of Europe, and the differentiation of religious organizations within the various language groups of Western Europe has been checked. As a result the more distant ones have seceded from Rome, but those which remain Roman all own allegiance to the Pope, an allegiance that creates problems for many a modern state. Reference has already been made to the vast importance of the Jesuits in maintaining this 'universalist' feature of religious and social life. In the east, Constantinople, long involved in her ultimately unsuccessful conflict with Asia and Islam, was not sufficiently strongly placed to spread analogous waves of enthusiasm. Also her lines of communication were decidedly difficult, and her ambassadors of religion depended more on local factors and local aid. Then again some of the lands reached from her knew nothing of Rome, and here her influence persisted, while others like Hungary, &c., had been for a time in the empire ruled from Rome and gravitated to the Roman Church. The case of Wallachia and Moldavia must be left for discussion later on. The Eastern Church has thus carried the universalist idea less far than the Roman. It has developed daughter churches, sometimes with well-marked peculiarities, within the language groups, so that now allegiance to one or another branch of the Eastern Church is often made a criterion of nationality in the Balkan areas of linguistic gradation and confusion. Religious {72} organization has tended to be within the State, and often a substitute for the State in Eastern Europe, instead of being above the State, at least in its claims, as in the west. With these facts of situation, physiography, people, languages, and religion in mind, we may now proceed to a somewhat closer survey of the peoples in the chief natural regions of Europe east of the Teutonic and Romance areas, allowing that the Bohemian (Czechoslovak) hill people and the Poles have already been dealt with to a large extent.