What is striking about Christian Europe at this period, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, is the withering of autonomous Church government in the face of State onslaught: the decay of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, the shackling of the Russian Orthodox Church to the imperial government, the growing impotence of the pope witnessed in the destruction of the Jesuits, but also, in the Protestant world, the effective silencing of the Church of England’s deliberative bodies.
