Volume 79 — THE GREEK CHURCH.

There can be no question with the philosopher, that war is one of the great sources of change in the movement of the world. Whether its purpose be conquest or defence, or its stimulant ambition or restlessness, or its immediate impulse the genius of some great leader, urging the rapacity of a people, the changes which it makes in the general mass of society are always more remarkable than those of any other instrument of human impression. Wars are the moral thunderstorms, which either cover the face of society with havoc, or purify its atmosphere. War is the shifting of the channel in which the great stream of society has hitherto flowed on, and the formation of the new course which fertilises a new region, while it leaves the old one barren; or, is like the power of steam, a pressure in its nature explosive, and marking its power only in its ruin, but capable of being guided into a general benefactor of man, and originating effects large and general beyond the means of any other mover.

To the reader of the Scriptures, the question is decided at once. War is constantly held forth as the instrument of Divine action—sometimes as punishment, sometimes as restoration, but always as subservient to a great providential intention. A voice of more than man calls Cyrus from the sands of Persia, at once to smite the pride of Babylon, and to break the chains of the Jew. The same voice summons Alexander from the hills of Macedonia to subvert Persepolis, and be the protector of the chosen people. We have the distinct declaration from the highest of all sources, that the Roman war which closed the national existence of that unhappy but memorable people, was the direct performance of the Divine will by the instrumentality of the heathen sword.

It is true, that in later history we have not the same power of ascertaining the distinct purposes of Providence. We “see through a glass darkly,” through the dimmed medium of human knowledge, through the comparison of things imperfectly shown, and the misty conjectures of man. Yet still it is a study honourable to human intelligence, and we are sometimes enabled, even by flashes and fragments of evidence, to trace without superstition or exaggeration the ways of that great Disposer, who balances the fates of nations, and whose vigilance is as sleepless as His power is immeasurable. No man conversant with modern history can doubt, that the war of the German princes in the sixteenth century sheltered the cradle of the Reformation, until the mighty infant was enabled to quit that cradle and assume maturity; or that the war with Spain and the destruction of the Armada gave English Protestantism an embodying of strength in England, and a renown abroad, which secured it from all assault either at home or abroad; or that the wars of William III., in Ireland and on the Continent, were the virtual throwing of a shield over Protestantism in England, and extinguishing by the sword in France the power which had pledged itself to the extermination of French Protestantism; or that the French revolutionary war, however originating in the national vices, had, in its conquest of the three Capitals of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, a direct connection with the vengeance of insulted justice, and the retribution of outraged humanity on the royal spoilers of unhappy Poland.

Nothing among the phases of human affairs has been a matter of older or more frequent wonder to both the philosopher and the Christian, than the condition of the country ranging along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. That, within the perpetual hearing, and almost within sight of the civilisation of Europe, with the sounds of its moral revolutions, progress, and discoveries in its ears, it has never exhibited an inclination to try the strength of its own frame in any of the exercises of self-government; that, with a population highly gifted by nature, acute, adroit, and even warlike, fifty-fold more numerous than the Turk; that, with the finest climate of the globe, the richest soil, the noblest historic recollections, the whole region, from Egypt to the Euphrates, should have exhibited its bravery in nothing but the exploits of banditti, its intelligence in nothing but the craft of the trafficker, and its philosophy in nothing but the submission of the slave, seems unaccountable.

Yet especially that Palestine, the land of which we can never speak the name, or remember the afflictions, or revolve the history, without homage, sorrow, and hope; that the soil, with every hill and valley and sea-shore sacred to the Christian heart, and the object of promises, on which we fully rely, yet which transcend all that earth has seen of blessing, power, and splendour,—the land of which Inspiration has pronounced: “Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended. Thy people also shall be all righteous: they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified. A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation: I the Lord will hasten it in his time” (Isaiah, lx. 20); that Palestine, towards which every man, Christian or Jew, looks, as the prophet in the days of the captivity looked in his prayer, should be still desolate; that even Jerusalem, whose very dust is dear to us, should be known as scarcely more than the haunt of obscure superstition, and the squabbles of Greek and Latin monks,—is among the most surprising facts of human annals.

We are by no means sanguine as to the effect of the war, into which Russia has provoked the Powers of Europe. It is an impulse which may pass away—a “wind which bloweth where it listeth, and we hear but the sound thereof”—a form of ambitious frenzy, starting up from the imperial couch, and, in the first moment of exhaustion, sinking back within its curtains. But, notwithstanding all those possibilities, to chide the eagerness of human anticipation, nothing is more evident than that the war has some features which distinguish it from all the wars since the fall of the Greek Empire. It is remarkable that its first quarrel was in Jerusalem, and the express contest was for the possession of the most venerated spot in Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre. Whether this quarrel was sincere or a pretence—whether to restore injured rights or to cover a determination of wrongs—is a matter of no moment in presence of the fact that thus began the Russian war. Another obvious fact is, that though there have been expeditions to the Levant within the century, as the march of Napoleon into Syria, and the later assaults on Acre, this is the first war, since the Crusades, which ever poured the weight of the great armies and navies of England and France on the East, which ever planted a solid step on the lands under the Mahommedan rule, which ever exhibited European strength, arts, discipline, and treasure, in their actual and distinct character, to the eye of the Mahommedan. If the European forces should be withdrawn to-morrow, there can be no doubt of their having thrown a new light on the mind of the Mahommedan world. The old generation must soon pass away, and a large portion of its prejudices must pass away with it. The new generation may respect its memory, and act as the pallbearers in its obsequies, but they will not go down into its grave. Already the Turk is becoming associated with the Englishman and the Frenchman; the English discipline of the Contingent must leave its impressions, even when the Contingent shall be broken up. The pay, the punctuality, the good order, and the gallantry of the service, cannot be forgotten; and the man will be cast into a mould, manlier and more capable of progress than any Turk, since the tribe, with the “black banner” before them, descended from the slopes of the Himalaya. The Christians of the Ottoman Empire have obtained new privileges already by this war. Measures are on foot for making their testimony available in the courts of justice. They are to have the right of bearing arms in the Ottoman service—a highly important innovation, and leading to every privilege; and there can be no doubt that the Ottoman government must acknowledge its old power of oppression to be at an end, or that any attempt at persecution or violence to its Christian subjects would be under penalty of provoking resistance from its Christian allies. All those results have their origin in the war, and those are in their nature progressive. Privilege begets privilege, and the next quarter of a century, whether in the struggles of war or the activity of peace, will place the Christians of the East in a position higher than their most sanguine speculation could have contemplated before the war on the Euxine.

Views of this order give additional value to that interesting subject, the character of the Christian Church in the East. It becomes important to know how far that Church is capable of assisting the progress, aiding the energies, or even conforming to the character of a people on the eve of renovation; whether it is to continue the swamp that it has been for the four centuries since the capture of Constantinople, or to be the fount flowing with the waters of national life; whether it is to be regarded as a monument of dreary ceremonial, encumbering the soil with its weight, and of doctrines incompatible with the gospel, or as only waiting to be freed from the barbarian accumulations of antiquity, to show the world an architecture worthy of its apostolic founders, and fit for the reception of enlightened mankind.

The Greek Church has, beyond all question, high claims to the consideration of Christendom as the mother of all the churches,—founded by the Apostles, governed by the last of the Apostles,—the Church of the first Christian empire, and for the first four centuries exhibiting the most illustrious examples of virtue and ability, of patience under trial, and of piety in the propagation of the faith. In the Church of proconsular Asia was the arena in which the strength of revelation was first tried against all the power of imperial heathenism, the severer combats than against the lions of Numidia. To that province was sent the message to the “Angels of the Seven Churches;” in its neighbouring Byzantium was erected the central Church, the spiritual sun, which spread its light through the East and West, through the shores and forests of the North, and through the mountains and wildernesses of the South,—the Church which, resisting the image-worship of the Western nations, and the mysterious mythology of the East, continued for fifteen hundred years the Ark of Christianity.

The subject has been frequently touched on in the rapid publications of our time, but with an inaccuracy of detail, and an obscurity of view, which fully justifies the attempt to rectify the one, and to clear up the other.

From the fourth century, the subtle spirit of the Greeks began to exercise itself in those questions of Scripture, which, being confessedly above the range of the human faculties, are to be received on the authority of Scripture alone, as the objects of faith, and not of experience. The Arian, Nestorian, and Eutychian heresies began to disturb the world. The great Council of Nice (A.D. 325), an assemblage of 318 bishops, declared the voice of the Church against the doctrine of Arius; yet the heresy continued for some ages to distract the empire. When these disputes had worn themselves out, another source of disturbance exhibited itself in the Civil claims of the rival Sees of Rome and Constantinople. The Bishop of Rome demanded the Supremacy for the sitter in the ancient capital of empire; the Bishop of Constantinople demanded it for the sitter in the capital of the actual empire. But the contest was unequal. The Bishop of the West had no imperial figure to thwart his authority; the Bishop of the East stood directly under the shadow of the imperial figure. The former was the lord of the faith to the half-civilised and superstitious millions of the barbarian settlers in Europe; the latter was surrounded with as many heresies as episcopates, with keen inquiries and doubtful fidelity, with philosophy envenomed into scepticism, and with four Patriarchs, sometimes denying his doctrine, and always envying his authority.

The contest continued through two centuries, treated by the warlike emperors with contempt, and regarded by the feeble emperors with alarm. At length it was decided by Justinian, one of those characters who form epochs in history. It is only by such epochs that we can mark the progress of those unvarying years and casual trains of events which form the stream of Time. Remote history is like the remote landscape; we judge of the country only by its mountain-tops. History has done but narrow justice to this restorer of the Roman empire. It has measured his imperial strength on the scale of his personal weakness; but the true estimate of the governor of kingdoms is by what he has done on the throne. Monarchs are actors, with their kingdom for a stage, and the world for their audience. When they throw off the royal robe and the buskin, they are but men; but who has a right to follow them behind the scenes? In the reign of Justinian was reunited the dislocated empire. Italy and Northern Africa were conjoined. The barbarian kingdoms of Europe were reduced into submission, the celebrated Code was established which formed the body of law to Europe for nearly ten centuries, and which exists as the civil law to this day. The noblest temple of Europe (until the sixteenth century), the Santa Sophia, was built by him, and he held the sceptre with undiminished authority to the end of a reign of thirty-nine years, and a life of eighty-three!

The sole imperial weakness of Justinian was his theology; he loved to mingle in the turbid discussions of the time. In one of those discussions, to conciliate the verdict of the Roman bishop, he conferred on him the title of “Head of the Universal Church,”—a title which no man could be guiltless in either bestowing or accepting, the title belonging to Him alone who earned it on Calvary; the bestowal was a usurpation, and the adoption a crime. From this transaction, and from the year 533, the Papacy dates its assumed supremacy over the Universal Church.

The separation of the Greek and the Latin Churches was near at hand. In the seventh century Rome had adopted image-worship. In the eighth century the Emperor Leo proclaimed it an abomination, and ordered that all images should be taken from the altars. The Pope (Gregory II.) answered the command by a challenge. His answer was an Anathema. “You accuse,” said his letter, “the Catholics of idolatry: in this you betray your own impiety. You assault us, tyrant, with a carnal and military hand; we can only implore Christ that he will send you a devil for the destruction of your body and the salvation of your soul. Are you ignorant that the Popes are the bands of union, the mediators of peace between the East and the West? The eyes of the nations are fixed on our humility, and they revere as a God on earth the Apostle St Peter, whose image you threaten to destroy. The remote kingdoms of the earth present their homage to Christ and His viceregent.” A war followed; Gregory sent out his “pastoral letters” through the West. The imperial troops were beaten in Italy by the peasant insurrection. A battle was fought on the banks of the Po, with such slaughter of the Greeks, that for a succession of years the people refused to eat of the fish. Rome was broken off from the empire. The imperial sovereignty of the West was at an end, after a dominion of seven centuries; and image-worship was established as the religion of the Popedom.

The schism of the churches was now begun. But the question had changed from doctrine, which the growing ignorance of the age was unable to discuss, to jurisdiction, a discussion which at once excited the ambition and fed the animosity of a time of darkness. The bitterness of the contest was increased in the ninth century by the elevation of Photius to the see of Constantinople.

This remarkable man was the solitary light of his age in the East. He was a layman, who had passed through the highest offices of the State, and a scholar who has left the monument of his scholarship to posterity in his celebrated Bibliotheca. To place him in the bishopric, the emperor deposed its former possessor, who appealed to Rome. The pope ordered his restoration; the emperor repeated his refusal.

It would be as idle to trace, as it would be difficult to disentangle, the perplexities of a quarrel which continued for centuries. But the consummation was now at hand. The Pope (Leo IX.), and the Patriarch, Cerularius, had excommunicated each other. A conference of pretended conciliation was held in Constantinople with the papal legates. It ended in new claims, met by new resistance: the legates, at last, went solemnly to the church of Santa Sophia, publicly read the letters of excommunication, placed the document of anathema on the high altar, and then departed from Constantinople! Thus in 1054 was completed the Schism, which had been commenced in arrogant ambition, and continued in priestly rancour; which had scandalised Christendom, and libelled Christianity; and which, in Asia, was punished by the conquests and conversions of Mahommedanism, and in Europe by the increased power, the darker superstition, and the sterner severities of Rome.

From this period we may state the doctrines and practices of the Greek Church, as an independent community.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is established. But the Holy Spirit is assumed to proceed from the Father only; in this point differing from the Popish and the Protestant Churches. This difference was the subject of long controversy between the East and the West, but, with the usual fate of ancient disputation, leaving both parties more confident in their own opinions.

On the doctrine of Redemption, its language is that of Scripture; Christ is acknowledged to be the Regenerator of our fallen nature. Justification by Faith includes the works which prove the sincerity of the faith, without which “faith is dead.”

Regeneration is regarded as essential, but this Church admits of no Indulgences; on this point differing totally from the practices of Rome.

The Church acknowledges no purgatory. But it holds an “intermediate state of the departed;” the spirits of the wicked remaining in a place of sorrow and comparative suffering, and those of the virtuous in a place of rest and comparative happiness; and both thus remaining until the Resurrection. But it admits “prayer for the dead;” not for the redemption of the spirit from a place of purification or partial penalty, but from a consideration of the Divine mercy. In those doctrines it makes some approach to Protestantism, though in praying for the dead it obviously goes beyond the only authority to which we can look for the condition of man after death—namely, Scripture.

In its ritual, the Church more nearly approaches Rome. It acknowledges as Sacraments, Marriage, Confirmation, Extreme Unction, Ordination, and Penance, in addition to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Baptism is administered by trine immersion.

Infants are baptised on the eighth day.

Chrism, or anointing with holy oil, which is regarded as confirmation, is administered soon after baptism.

The Lord’s Supper is administered under both forms, the bread and the wine, to both priest and laity. But the Church holds transubstantiation, or, in the words of the Confession, “when the priest consecrates the elements, the very substance of the bread and wine is transformed into the substance of the true body and blood of Christ.”

The ceremonial of the consecration is worth remarking, as it seems to have been taken in some degree as the model for the modern innovations in the English Ritual. The elements are first carried round the church on the head of the deacon; then the priest prays that the Almighty may convert them into the substance of the body and blood. He then prays to the Holy Spirit for His gift. He then prays to Jesus Christ, as sitting on the right hand of the Father, and yet invisibly present, to impart to the receivers “His immaculate body and precious blood.” Still, there are some distinctions in the Eastern and Western practice. The same degree of worship is not offered to the Host as in the Romish Church. It is not carried in procession, nor is it offered to public adoration, nor is there any festival in its honour. It is carried to the sick, but the priests do not prostrate themselves before it. All this ceremonial the Eastern Church pretends to justify on the ground of antiquity, where it was not to be found in the purest and most primitive centuries. The Protestant looks to the original solemnisation, and takes his practice from Scripture. What common sense can believe that Jesus of Nazareth gave His actual body to be eaten before His eyes, or that the Apostles, while at supper, believed that they were eating flesh and drinking blood, and this without a sign of repulsion and reluctance, or without even a remonstrance or an inquiry? The words, “This do in remembrance of me,” are a sufficient declaration that neither His flesh nor His blood was to remain on earth; for remembrance implied departure. And that the remembrance was the express purpose, is distinctly declared in the words, “As oft as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s death till He come;”—thus extinguishing at once transubstantiation, and the more diluted doctrine of the “Real presence.” St Paul (A.D. 59) describes the Sacrament as still the bread and the cup (1st Corinthians, xi. 26), the popular dishonour of which would involve dishonour to the body and blood of which they were the representatives. And he further states, that when the “Real presence” shall have come, the representation shall pass away; as in the instance of the Jewish sacrifices, which represented the offering of Christ, but when the real offering was come, the representation naturally passed away, the Temple was overthrown, and sacrifice was no more. And this was the language of the great Apostle of the Gentiles upwards of a quarter of a century after the Crucifixion. If St Paul believed in Transubstantiation, it is impossible to doubt that he would have scrupulously avoided any mention of the “bread and the cup,” particularly on an occasion when he was warning the dissolute and disputatious Corinthians of the danger of disrespect to the Sacrament.

The Greek Church holds the doctrine of Penance, Absolution by the priest, and Auricular Confession, as a consequence of the doctrine of Absolution, “the priest not knowing what to absolve until he knows the state of the penitent.” Absolution and Confession are held to be of the highest importance, and of the most general application. They have been termed “the axle on which the globe of ecclesiastical polity turns;” and beyond question they have been the most extensive sources of power and revenue to both the Greek faith and the Roman.

CEREMONIAL.

The Ritual of the Eastern Church is even more laborious than that of the Roman, both churches in this point straying from the simplicity of Scripture. The elaborate ritual of the Jewish dispensation was for a Divine purpose—the separation of the people from Heathenism; but when that purpose ceased with the cessation of the national privileges and the coming of Christianity, ceremonial perished, as being unnecessary to a religion whose laws were to be “written in the heart,” and as inconsistent with the nature of a religion which was yet to be universal. Christ came to redeem mankind, not only from the yoke of sin, but the yoke of ceremonial. “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,” was the language, not merely of help to human nature, but of relief from the weight of ordinances. Christianity has no ceremonial, and but two rites, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It has forms, for forms are essential to order, but it prescribes no system of worship, no locality, and no labour of devotion.

The Greek Church abounds in Fastings, and those of the severest order. Besides the Lent of the Western Church, it has three seasons of public abstinence within the year—one from St Whitsuntide to St Peter’s Day, one from the 6th to the 15th of August, and one during the forty days before Christmas. In the monasteries, to this number is superadded one for the first fourteen days of September, in honour of the “Exaltation of the Holy Cross;” and those unnatural and unnecessary abstinences are practised, in general, with extreme severity, even to the rejection of all fish. On the other hand, the festivals of their saints are literally feasts; thus producing, in the one instance, hazard to health, and in the other, hazard to morals. These feasts, however, and their attendant levities, have the presumed character of religion; and the saint of the day is especially invoked as an intercessor, equally in contradiction to common sense and the Gospel,—the first telling us the folly of appealing to beings of whom we cannot possibly know whether they can hear or answer prayer, and the second, declaring that there is but one intercessor between God and man, Jesus Christ.

Image-worship is held in abhorrence by the Eastern Church, yet it pays the same species of adoration to pictures; on the idea, that while images represent the inventions of man, pictures represent some real existence; or that, in the words of St Paul, “An idol is nothing in the world” (1st Corinthians, viii. 4), while a picture is the adumbration of some true transaction,—as the existence of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints, &c. But, for the purpose of preserving their devotion as pure as possible, they make those pictures generally the most unattractive possible. With the higher orders the picture may serve only as a stimulant to devotion, but, with the peasantry, the adoration is probably complete.

The Greek priests of the higher order generally exhibit a reluctance to acknowledge the reality of this worship, this “pinakolatria,” if we must coin a word for it. They acknowledge the popular homage, but excuse it on the ground of respect for memorable names; as in common life we preserve the pictures of memorable persons, and value those of our departed friends. But the Eastern homage goes wholly beyond this grateful observance. We do not make genuflections to the pictures of our great men, nor pray to those of our friends, nor send those pictures to assist women in the sufferings of childbirth, nor place them on the beds of the dying, nor believe them to work miracles.

In fact, this worship of resemblances, whether pictures or images, is one of the most general, and yet most improbable, delusions in the world. To imagine that the statue which we carve, or the picture which we paint, the actual work of our hands, is gifted with powers above the man who has made it; or can have a holiness which he has not, or faculties of which he is unconscious, or a spirit which he can approach only with homage,—is an absurdity which tasks the utmost credulity of man. Or if he be willing to try the effect of this contempt, he may fling the statue from its pedestal, or take down the picture from its shrine, with the most perfect impunity. And yet, what millions have worshipped the statue and the picture, and worship them still!

In the first ages of Christianity, worship was exclusively given to the God of the Gospel; the objects of heathen adoration were an abhorrence, and the ceremonial of the temples a theme of perpetual scorn. At length, however, the influence of heathenism returned; Christian corruption adopted its emblems, and the images of Christ and the Virgin were surrounded by the sicklier devotees or more fanatical formalists of the Church. Then came miracles. The perils of the Greek Empire required supernatural protectors; and the Greek, unused to arms, and trembling at Saracen invasion, gladly committed the hazardous trust of defending his battlements to the saint in his hands. The city of Edessa was thus saved! by the sight of a napkin, marked with the face of Jesus. These cheap defences finally failed, and Mahomet was lord of the Empire; but the passion for the picture still lived among the serfs of the Caliph; and while Europe, looking on the remote danger with secure contempt, multiplied her idols, Greece, under her Arab scourge, cherished her pictures as the source of her consolation.

The chief treasure of her mythology, the Veron Eikon, or true resemblance, was a picture of our Lord, supposed to bear His impression from having wiped His face on Calvary. This He gave to a woman, who gave it to the Emperor Tiberius, whom it cured of the gout! But as the napkin was triple-folded, it carried three impressions, which were impartially divided among the faithful; one being sent to Constantinople, another to Paris, and the third being already in the hands of that rather hazardous guardian of relics, Tiberius. The Veron Eikon has seen a great deal of service since, and its last exploit was its attempt to rout the French column advancing to Rome in 1796, an attempt in which it unhappily failed. Such is the history of the most authentic, renowned, and sacred relic of the Greek and Popish world. The historian^[13] gives the hymn of Byzantium to the Veronica (for they changed it into a female, and the female into a saint) in the sixth century. “How can we with mortal eyes contemplate this image, whose celestial splendour the host of heaven presumes not to behold? He who dwells in heaven condescends this day to visit us by His venerable image. He who is seated on the Cherubim visits us this day by a picture; which the Father has delineated with His immaculate hand, which He has formed in an ineffable manner, and which we sanctify by adoring it with faith and love.” Such is idolatry everywhere at this hour!

The “sign of the Cross” is universal, and almost perpetual. The Cross itself is frequently addressed in prayer, and in language applicable only to the Divine Being. A quotation from Stourdza, a man of intelligence and learning, in his defence of the Greek Church, will show to what an extent this mysticism can be carried.

“The Cross is the representative of the structure of man. It seems to have been formed expressly for man, and its punishment explicitly to serve as the emblem of his misery and his grandeur. Standing erect, looking down on all surrounding things, the arms extended as if to embrace the immense space of which it appears the King; the feet fixed in this valley of tears, the brow crowned with thorns, signs of the cares which surround man even to the tomb. Behold the Man! Ecce homo—behold the adorable attitude of the God-man upon the earth. The more we contemplate, the more we must feel that it is only by the punishment of the Cross that Jesus Christ could express in Himself all the woes and all the transgressions of man, expiate them, ransom them, and exhibit collectively the human race under one form alone.”

The use of tapers and torches in daylight services is defended, not on the Popish principle of emblematising the Holy Spirit, but on the more plausible ground of imitating the primitive ages, when the Christians met only before daylight and in caverns. Both are equally presumptuous, as unauthorised by Scripture; and both equally profane, as palpably adopted from heathenism.

The services of the Greek Church are wearisomely long; they are in Hellenic, and therefore almost wholly unintelligible to the people, and they are intolerably laborious to the priest; the whole body of the services occupying twenty folio volumes, with an additional volume of directions!—a study to which the time of the priest is almost wholly confined, not for its knowledge, but for its manipulation; the selection of the services appropriate to the day, which change every day, and even in the course of the day. The Liturgy, so called, is limited to a small portion of those labours, namely, the Communion.

Ambition in a priesthood and ignorance in a people always produce superstition; the priest eager to extend his authority, and the people unable to detect the imposture. The natural results are, the Legend and the pretended Miracle. These practices in the Greek Church take a colouring from the picturesque region and the romantic fancy of the people. Every island, and perhaps every hill and valley, has its sacred spot, to which the population approach in long processions on any remarkable public circumstance, whether of Nature or the Calendar. To appease an epidemic, to still an earthquake, to make the skies propitious after a drought, or to call down the peculiar aid of the Virgin, who usurps, in the Greek mind, the whole power of intercession, and thus effectively possesses the sceptre of Omnipotence, summons the multitude in all their pageantry.

The services of the Church being performed in a tongue comparatively obsolete, and being recited by the priest habitually in a tone of mystery, which renders them scarcely audible, if they were understood, leave the people in almost total ignorance of their meaning, and of course indifferent to all but the forms of devotion. Like the priest of Rome, the Greek priest is the presumed mediator, not the leader of the popular devotion; his prayers are for, not with, the people. Thus his performance of the service is supposed to answer its purpose, whether audible or whispered. One portion of his duty, however, addresses itself to the general ear,—the reading of the “Lives of the Saints,” entitled “The Tablet of the United Worthies,” a record of 365 lives; all equal to gorge the most ravenous credulity. Greece, once the land of invention, is now the land of imposture; the original talent of the soil is now exhausted on dreary fiction. Still believing in magic, charms, the influence of dreams, and the inspiration of the “genius loci,” they are prepared to welcome every folly of fanaticism, and submit to every artifice of superstition.

GOVERNMENT.

The four Patriarchs, of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, are the religious rulers of the Greek Church; the three latter being, in a certain degree, subordinate to the Patriarch of Constantinople, without whose consent nothing of general importance can be effected. This Patriarch is elected by the votes of the neighbouring bishops; but he must be presented to the Sultan for institution; and as nothing is done in Turkey without a present, the fee on this occasion amounts to 20,000 or 30,000 dollars, the Sultan still retaining the power of deposition, banishment, or even of death. The Patriarch possesses the considerable privilege of naming his brother patriarchs, but the rescript of the Sultan is still necessary for their confirmation, and even to that of every bishop who may be appointed by the Patriarch. Thus the Greek Church exhibits none of the “supremacy” of the Roman. It has since the reign of Constantine claimed no “temporal sovereignty,” and it has thus in some measure been freed from the intrigues, violences, and crimes, which form so large a part of the history of priestly ambition.

Another important prevention of those evils was the marriage of the parochial priesthood. In the earlier periods of this Church, marriage was commanded to the priest, and was considered so necessary to his office that on the death of his wife he must give up his parish. Even now, notwithstanding the example of Rome, the secular clergy are permitted to marry, though only once. The regular clergy (monks) are not permitted to marry, on the absurd principle that their lives are an offering for the popular sins, and that celibacy belongs to holiness. The marriage of the priesthood had the natural effect of rendering them loyal, by the connection of their children with the country, of preventing the irregularities to which constrained celibacy inevitably gives rise, and of preventing that ambition for the influence of their class which naturally exhibits itself in great bodies who have no tie but to the head of their order. Constrained celibacy is, in fact, a conspiracy against human nature, which always transpires in a conspiracy against human Allegiance.

Monasticism forms a prominent feature of the system. The Greek convents are numerous, powerful, and in some instances opulent. Their inhabitants are divided into Caloyers (monks) and lay brethren. The lives of the former are comparatively indolent; of the latter, comparatively laborious. But the Caloyer has his peculiar round of irksome occupations. Matins begin at four in the morning, and last until dawn. The performance of the Liturgy is followed by reciting the life of some saint, and that is followed again by nine hymns, six of which are to the Virgin, and three to the saint of the day. In Lent, his task is wearisome: he must go through the whole Psalter every day, and perform the Metania, which consists in kissing the ground three hundred times in the twenty-four hours. To this employment four hours of the night, of which two are immediately after midnight, are devoted. How any human understanding can conceive that this drudgery is connected with virtue, is productive of good to man, or is acceptable to his Creator, must be left to the reveries of the monk, and the recorded absurdities of human nature.

The lay brothers are the farmers, the shepherds, the tillers, and the traders of the convent. They are industrious, and so far they remove the stigma from the general uselessness of conventual life. Some of those communities are largely endowed. The monks of the well-known brotherhood of Mount Athos have twenty convents, and possess extensive lands. Their Turkish taxation is generally moderate, and indolence never had an easier form than in the shape of the Caloyer.

The state of the Russian Church would lead us too far into inquiry; but it has a history of its own, some remarkable peculiarities, and some prospects well worthy of examination. Those who feel an interest in the subject may be referred to Stourdza, Considerations sur la Doctrine, to King On the Russian Church, and to the brief but exact Treatise on the Greek Church by the present learned Dean of Durham. The subject may well interest us, when it involves the religious welfare of the millions inhabiting the Eastern provinces of Europe, the Danubian provinces, the length of Asia Minor, a portion of Syria, Assyria, and Africa, and the sixty millions of Russia—an immense extent of human existence, which a few years may open to a purer faith, and which is already qualifying, by the effects of knowledge, suffering, and war, for the Gospel.

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