the memory; but the two races have scarcely more resemblance to each other than the modern Romaic has to classical Greek: the framework only remains the transcendant force and richness and elegance are departed. And the two corruptions are intimately connected with each other: the change in the character of the people produced a corresponding change in the language; and it is far easier to fix the period at which this change began than to determine with any precision what were the causes to which it is to be attributed. On the whole, we incline to ascribe it to the very large amount of slave population in Greece: for, when the Gothic invasions took place, the slaughter fell principally upon Greeks proper, the slave population amalgamating with the invaders, and imparting to them arts and a language superior to their own, but far inferior to that of ancient Greece; and thus it is that enslaving other men, sooner or later, brings about its own dire retribution.

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Slavery was for many ages the principal agent of productive industry in Greece; the soil was cultivated by slaves and all manufactured articles were produced by their labour. Throughout the whole country they formed at least one-half of the population. Now, although the freedmen and descendants of liberated foreign slaves never formed as important an element in the higher classes of the population of Greece as they did of Rome, still they must have exerted a considerable influence on society; and here a question forces itself on the attention : whether the singular corruption which the Greek language has undergone, according to one envarying type, in every land where it was spoken, from Syracuse to Trebizond, must not be in great part attributed to the infusion of foreign elements which slavery introduced into Hellenic society in numberless streams, all flowing from a similar ? The Thracians and Sclavonians were for centuries to the slave trade of the Greeks what the Georgians and Circassians have been for ages to the Mohammedan nations, and the negroes of the African coast to the European colonies in America.

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"Whatever may have been the operation of these causes in adulterating the purity of the Hellenic race and the Greek language, we know that they did not display any effect until about the middle of the sixth century of our era: at that time the population of Greece presented all the external signs of a homogeneous people. In the third century the Greek language was spoken by the rural population with as much purity as by the inhabitants of the towns, and even the ancient peculiarities of dialect were often preserved...... The causes that transformed the ancient Greeks of Justinian's age into the modern Greeks who inhabited the soil of Hellas in the time of the Crusaders seem, on the whole, to have been internal rather than external. Foreign invaders had less to do with the change than slavery, ignorance, and social degradation. Time alone might claim some share in the transformation; but time ought to be an improver in every well con

stituted community: and the orthodox Church, which exercised a very powerful social influence on the Greek race during the period in question, must be supposed to have counteracted the progress of corruption. Among an illiterate people like the Greeks of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, each successive generation alters the language of oral communication by neglecting inflections and disregarding grammatical rules. A corrupted pronunciation confounds orthography, and obscures the comprehension of the grammatical changes which words undergo. Indeed, the whole process of transforming the Hellenic language into the Romaic, or modern Greek dialect, seems to have arisen out of a long neglect of the rules of grammar and orthography; and the pronunciation, though corrupted in the confusion it makes of vowels and dipthongs, is evidently based on the ancient, from the tenacity with which it has preserved the Hellenic accentuation, after the disappearance of every trace of quantity...... The laws of Justinian blended all classes of citizens into one mass, and facilitated the acquisition of the boon of freedom by every Christian slave. The pride of the Hellenic race was stifled, and the Greeks for centuries were proud of the name of Romans, and eager to be ranked with the freedmen and manumitted slaves of the masters of the world.

"The Greek Church grew up; and the Greek Church was neither Greek nor Roman, but it created to itself a separate power under the name of orthodox,' which, by forming a partnership with the imperial authority, acquired a more energetic existence than any nationality could have conferred: it controlled the actions and the intellects of the Greeks with despotic power. A system of laws at variance with all the prejudices of ancient, private, and political life was framed, and the consequence was that a new people arose out of the change. Such seems to be the origin of the modern Greeks, a people which displays many appearances of homogeniety in character, though it is widely dispersed in various insulated districts, from Corfu to Trebizond, and from Philippolis to Cyprus; but to what extent the original Hellenic race was mixed and adulterated with slaves and foreigners, is not very clear from the great patent facts of history" (Finlay, 5, 7).

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We must in all fairness presume that the Greek Church did what it could to stem this tide of corruption and ignorance, and that things would have been still worse but for the powerful social influence" which the clergy exercised during this period; yet it gives but a low idea of a Church which was not able to effect more, though, when we consider that its priests were necessarily taken from the midst of such a people, their standard was probably very little raised above that of the general mass. It is generally acknowledged that John Damascene, A.D. 730, is the last of the Greek fathers whose writings are entitled to any regard; and even he was a strenuous advocate of image worship. And when we consider the condition into which the whole of the Eastern empire has been brought under the Turkish rule, the Greek Church may

be regarded as an object of pity rather than blame but for its ridiculous pretension to be the only orthodox Church, and if we could also forget the fact that the heresies it promulgated brought down upon it these heavy judgments, and yet that it has not repented (Rev. ix. 20).

It was not necessary for Mr. Finlay's object to notice, except incidentally, the schism between the Greek and Roman Churches. He merely observes that

"The animosity and cruelty of the Sicilian troops against the Grecks were increased by the ecclesiastical quarrels of the Popes of Rome and Patriarchs of Constantinople. The influence of the Latin and Greek clergy rapidly disseminated the hatred caused by these dissensions throughout the people. The ambition of the Patriarch Photius laid the foundation of the separation of the two Churches in the ninth century. He objected to the words, and the Son,' which the Latins had inserted in the original creed of the Christian Church, and to some variations in the discipline and usages of the Church which they had adopted; and he made these a pretext for attacking the supremacy and orthodoxy of the Pope. The Christian world was astonished by the disgraceful spectacle of the Bishops of Rome and Constantinople mutually excommunicating one another, and each pointing out his rival as one who merited the reprobation of man and the wrath of God" (73). "The crimes of which the Patriarch (in 1053) accused the Pope, and on account of which the Greeks deemed the Latins worthy of eternal damnation, were these: the addition of the words, and the Son' to the clause of the primitive creed of the Christians, declaring the belief in the Holy Ghost, who proceedeth from the Father; the use of unleavened bread in the holy communion; the use in the kitchens of the Latins of things strangled, and of blood, in violation of the apostle's express commands; the indulgence granted to monks to make use of lard in cooking and to eat meat when sick; the use of rings by Latin bishops as a symbol of their marriage with the Church, while, as the Greeks sagaciously observed, the marriage of bishops is altogether unlawful; and, to complete the folly of this disastrous quarrel, the Greek clergy even made it a crime that the Latin priests shaved their beards and baptised by a single immersion. Whatever may be the importance of these errors in a moral or religious point of view, it is certain that the violence displayed by the clergy in irritating the religious hatred between the Greeks and Latins contributed to hasten the ruin of the Greek nation" (75).

There were real crimes of a blasphemous and idolatrous character which might have been alleged against Rome; but the Eastern Church was not in a condition to cast the first stone at the Western on these accounts, and there was that grand all-inclusive crime of making light of sins of all kinds, including perjury, under cover of the power of the keys, which has made Rome a moral dry-rot; and has eaten out all con

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fidence between man and man, and loosened all the bonds of society wherever the Roman system has gained a footing. The sale of indulgences, which roused the indignation of Luther and brought about the Reformation, was no new thing it was but an indiscreet, impolitic, display before the world of a practice which had been carried on by the priests in private for centuries. And so the falsehood and perjury which is at the present day practised under the sanction of Liguori and the Jesuits, whose principles are openly avowed by the Roman hierarchy, was not invented by the Jesuitsthey only reduced to a system practices which had become notorious to all the world, and the Pope only sanctions by word principles which had been acted on by his predecessors for centuries.

Prince William of Achaia, who belonged to the Roman communion, was taken prisoner by the Greek Emperor or Michael VIII., in 1263, and remained three years captive :

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"He was compelled to cede to the Greek Emperor, as the price of his deliverance, the fortresses of Monemvasia, Misithra, and Maina, the very cities which were especially connected with his own glory; and he engaged besides, with solemn oaths and the direst imprecations, never to make war on the Greek Emperor-ratifying his assurances of perpetual amity by standing godfather to the Emperor's youngest son, which was considered a sacred family-tie among the Greeks; yet the Chronicles,' speaking in the spirit of the times, declare that he resolved to pay no attention to these engagements as soon as he could obtain the authority of the Pope and the Latin Church to violate his oath, trusting that his holiness would readily release him from obligations entered into with a heretic and extorted by force. The ecclesiastical morality of the age viewed the violations of the most sacred promises as lawful whenever they interfered with the interests of the Papal Church" (235).

Supremacy, as we have said, was the one sole object of the Church of Rome; and this end they kept steadily in viewthis object they pursued per fas et nefas

"Though the conquest of the Byzantine empire (by the Crusaders) had been made in express violation of the commands of Innocent III., that Pope showed a determination to profit by the crime as soon as it was perpetrated, and displayed a willingness to promote the views of the Crusaders, on condition that the affairs of the Church should be settled in a manner satisfactory to the Papal see. There were, nevertheless, so many discordant interests and class rivalities at work in the ecclesiastical condition of the new empire that it required all the talents of Innocent III., the greatest of the Popes, and all the moderation and firmness of Henry of Flanders, the most conciliatory of Emperors, to avoid open quarrels between the Church and State.

The Pope was determined to maintain the same control over the Church in the East which he had laid claim to in the West. Without this authority the union of the Greek and Latin Churches had little signification at the Papal Court, where the union could only be regarded as consummated when the Patriarch of Constantinople was reduced to the condition of a suffragan of the Bishop of Rome" (117).

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We had intended to notice Mr. Macfarlane's " Turkey and its Destiny," the object of which is to show, from an extensive survey of the Turkish empire in all its departments, that it presents every symptom of speedy dissolution. But the length to which our remarks have already extended renders this inexpedient on the present occasion. It may suffice to refer such of our readers as wish for proofs of the decay of the Turkish power to Mr. Macfarlane's volumes, and we may safely assume, for our present purpose, that such is the case.

Whenever this crisis shall arrive, two questions will have to be settled-the Church question and the State question; and these will be found complicated by the anomalous position of affairs in Europe. The French and Austrians are evidently manoeuvering for the possession of Rome and Italy as giving the possessor a controul over the Roman Catholic countries. France and Austria, both in religion and politics, are at the opposite extremes of liberalism and despotism. But Austria could not have stood its ground without the assistance of Russia; and the Emperor of Russia is really the head of the Greek Church within his dominions in a fuller and more absolute sense than the Pope is head of the Latin Church, and he is not a man to relax one iota of what he thinks due to him by a time-serving policy. From the time when Peter the Great made himself head of the Russo-Greek Church, the Russian eye has been fixed upon Constantinople as in due time to become its easy prey. All its movements have a southerly direction: it has no remaining obstacle by sea, and its only ostensible obstacle by land is Austria. This last power is now reduced almost to the condition of a dependent on Russia, and could scarcely venture to assume an attitude of opposition to its will, even if it had the power to present an effectual resistance; and it is not at all improbable that Russia may calculate upon Austria getting embroiled with France for the possession of Rome, so as to allow free scope for the development of the ambitious projects of Russia in the East.

Whenever the Turkish empire falls, we think that the Greek Church must fall with it; for it has none of the elements of stability and would not be able to stand alone. It is not

VOL. XXXI-D