Note 350 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In any case, it cannot seriously be pretended that the mental life of Christian Greece in modern times has yielded, apart from services to simple scholarship, a much better result to the world at large than has that of Turkey. The usual reactions in individual cases of course take place. An American traveller writing in 1856 notes how illiterate Greek priests glory in their ignorance, “asserting that a more liberal education has the effect of making atheists of the youth.” He adds that he has “known several deacons and others in the University [of Athens] that were skeptics even as to the truth of religion,” and would gladly have become laymen if they could have secured a livelihood.350 But there was then and later in the century no measurable movement of a rationalistic kind. At the time of the emancipation the Greek priesthood was “in general at once the most ignorant and the most vicious portion of the community”;351 and it remained socially predominant and reactionary. “Whatever progress has been made in Greece has received but little assistance from them.”352 Liberal-minded professors in the theological school were mutinied against by bigoted students,353 a type still much in evidence at Athens; and the liberal thinker Theophilus Kaïres, charged with teaching “atheistic doctrines,” and found guilty with three of his followers, died of jail fever while his appeal to the Areopagus was pending.354