All through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and till near the end of the eighteenth, the masses of Europe remained attached to their respective Churches in despite of the play of criticism among the more instructed. Whether popular religion be regarded as a matter of habit and superstition or as the expression of a higher happiness in religious rites, it has unquestionably numbered the great majority down till recent times. How the Catholic Church recovered large parts of Germany, practically all Poland and Bohemia, and for a time the complete control of France, we have seen. Within her sphere popular conduct was certainly no worse than in the age of her undivided power; and where she could number within her fold minds like Paolo Sarpi, the historian of the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century; like Pascal and FÉnelon and Bossuet in the seventeenth; and like Vico in the eighteenth, though in hardly any case are such leading spirits found to be in thorough harmony with the papal system, she could not but hold the respect of a great body even of educated people.

Her swarms of missionaries, too, seemed for a time to have begun a new era of Catholic expansion in Asia and America, finding footing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Japan, China, India, Siam, Tonkin, as well as in North and South America. Sent forth by the College of Propaganda (Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) founded in 1622, they displayed a zeal never surpassed in the Church’s history. In Japan and China, in particular, they had for a time a dazzling success, largely through the address of the Jesuits—whose policy was to win converts by identifying native rites and beliefs with Christian, never openly assailing but always seeking to assimilate them. As early as 1549, Francis Xavier had preached the faith in Japan, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century it seemed likely to become the religion of the State. But Christians undid the Christian cause. Between the various orders of Catholic missionaries there were always deadly jealousies, all the others denouncing the Jesuits, who in turn charged incompetence and malevolence on all; and the increasing arrogance of the propagandists in Japan gave colour to the hints of the Protestant traders, Dutch and English, that Catholic missions were a prelude to Catholic conquest. The Japanese emperor, accordingly, began a great persecution in 1587, and during a number of years the Christian converts were slaughtered by tens of thousands. Still the Jesuits persevered; but in the next generation persecution began afresh. At length, in 1637, by a supreme effort, the weakened Catholic flock were wholly destroyed or expelled. Once more it had been demonstrated that really determined and rigorous persecution by a majority in power can eradicate the Christian or any other religion in a given sphere.

In Siam in the next century a slight success was similarly followed by expulsion; and in China, where an outward success had been won as a sequel to the expansion in Japan, and where the Christian cause subsisted longer, despite some persecution and despite the fierce dissensions of the different orders on points both of doctrine and corporate conduct, it dwindled in the eighteenth century. The success, indeed, had been all along illusory, as the Chinese had adapted rather than adopted Christian forms, and merely carried on their usual rites under Christian auspices. When, accordingly, the rival orders at length forced on the papacy, in the teeth of the Jesuits, a decision as to whether Chinese Christians should or should not truly conform to Christian doctrine, and a decision against the Jesuits was given, the semblance of conversion melted away, and a reversion to Jesuit methods could not restore it. A similar decision made an end of a rather flourishing movement of Jesuit Brahmanism in India about the middle of the eighteenth century; and the other labours of the Catholic missionaries in India were undone by the cruelties of their own Inquisition.

Jesuitism had by this time been convicted of aiming in the old fashion at its own worldly wealth, of troubling by its political plottings the peace of every country it could enter, and of setting up its own ambitions against the papal authority. In the East it had become a great wealth-hunting corporation; in South America it was the same, contriving for some generations to govern Paraguay in particular wholly for its own enrichment; in Europe it provoked every Catholic government in turn by its audacious attempts to control them. Thus it was expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1762, from Bohemia in 1766; from Spain, Genoa, and Venice in 1767; and from Naples, Malta, and Parma in 1768. At length, in 1773, the Society was suppressed by a papal bull, and though it was revived in the nineteenth century it has never since been the power it was, whether for evil or for good.

Of her extensions beyond Europe there thus remained substantially to the Church of Rome at the end of the eighteenth century only the Catholic populations of Central and South America and Canada; and at the outbreak of the French Revolution, marked as it was by the wholesale abjurations of Catholic priests and populace, it might have seemed as if the reign of Rome in Europe were coming to an end. The political movement, however, had outrun the educational; and as we have seen, there was even a literary reaction at the Restoration. In Italy, where the revolutionary movement had been hostile to the Church, the reaction after 1815 was very marked. All criticism of Catholicism was made a penal offence, and in the Kingdom of Naples alone, in 1825, there were twenty-seven thousand priests, eight thousand nuns, as many monks, twenty archbishops, and seventy-three bishops. In Spain and France, too, the clergy worked hard to recover authority over the people; and in Catholic Ireland they had never lost it, despite all the efforts of Protestantism.

Everywhere, however, save in America, the struggle for existence has gone against Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Catholic Ireland has been in large measure depopulated through the failure of Protestant England to solve its economic problems; and though this means a gain to Romanism in the United States, there is no great likelihood that that is permanent, or that Catholicism there will ever be very docile to the papacy. France has become gradually more rationalistic, so much so that the municipal government of Paris is usually in the hands of freethinkers; and the recent expulsion of the recalcitrant religious orders has proved the determination of the republican majority to put down clerical influence. The movement of anti-theological Positivism, founded by the teaching of Auguste Comte (d. 1857) on bases laid by Saint-Simon, has never been numerically strong, but has affected all French thought; and to-day there is scarcely one eminent French writer who professes religious opinions. Even in Spain, so long the stronghold of the faith, and still more generally in Italy, educated men are as a rule either indifferent or hostile to the Church; and the common people, especially the Socialists in the towns, have gone the same way. Both in Spain and Portugal there are journals zealously devoted to a propaganda of freethought; and the judicial murder of Ferrer has but intensified hostility to the Church. National union in Italy, accomplished in the middle of the century, has been fatal to ecclesiastical supremacy. The papacy is unable to recover its temporal power at Rome. In Catholic Belgium, the action of the clergy is constantly fought by a ubiquitous freethought propaganda; and Dutch Catholicism does not gain ground.

Some appearance of Catholic revival occurred in England in the second and third generations of the nineteenth century, the “Oxford movement” preparing the ground; but though John Henry Newman was followed into the Catholic Church by a number of clergymen and rich laymen, the movement soon ceased to be intellectually important, and the popular success seems to have reached its limits. Though there is much leaning to Rome in the High Church section of the heterogeneous Anglican body, it is certain that while the economic basis remains Protestant there will be no great secession. Economic considerations, again, have latterly set up even in Catholic Austria—which with Southern Germany is perhaps the most believing section of the Catholic world—a movement with the watchword “Loose from Rome.” In Brazil, again, there has been a quite extraordinary development of Positivism among the educated class; and the revolution which peacefully expelled the last emperor—himself personally estimable, and not an orthodox Catholic—was ostensibly wrought by the Positivist party. Portugal, finally, has taken the same path.

Thus the age which saw the promulgation of the formal decree of Papal Infallibility (1870) has seen the most vital decline that has ever taken place in the total life and power of the Church of Rome. It preserves its full hold to-day only on (1) the most ignorant or most rural sections of the population of Catholic countries, (2) the unintellectual sections of their middle and upper classes, and (3) the emotionally religious or pietistic types, who are still, by reason of the total circumstances, more numerous among women than among men. Hence in the Catholic countries, female education being there specially backward, the Church depends relatively even more on women than do the churches of the Protestant world. But among women in the Catholic countries also there goes on a process of rationalization, Socialism doing some of the work of education where the other machinery is inadequate.

The failure of Protestantism to gain any ground in Europe after the sixteenth century had naturally the effect of increasing the zeal of its adherents within their own sphere; and though nowhere did Protestant organization compare in energy with that shown by the Society of Jesus and the Roman College of Propaganda, the system of popular education in several countries—as Switzerland, Scotland, and parts of Germany—was raised much above the popular Catholic level. Presbyterians in particular felt the need of popular schools for the maintenance of their polity. The result was, after a time, a certain improvement in the capacity and conditions of the common people where other causes did not interfere. Thus the Protestant cantons of Switzerland have in general been noted for a greater material prosperity than that of the Catholic cantons; and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Presbyterian Scotland, though naturally much the poorer country, admittedly turned out a larger proportion of men qualified for responsible positions than did episcopalian England.

All the while, the influence of a Presbyterian clergy, in touch with the people and able to ostracize socially those who avowed unbelief, maintained in the Calvinistic countries a higher average of professed orthodoxy, the normal effect of higher education being thus checked on the side of religion. Scotland contributed little to the earlier deistic movement of the eighteenth century, Smith and Hume having taken it up after it had flourished for a generation in England; and at no time was rationalism socially avowed to the same extent in the north as in the south, the enlightenment of the lay authors being confined to a small town circle.

On the moral and Æsthetic side, however, popular Presbyterianism tended to be hard and joyless, with the natural result, seen alike in Geneva and in Scotland, of breeding much licence. On the other hand there arose a higher reaction, towards intellectual interests; and the Switzerland of the eighteenth century produced a remarkably large proportion of scientific men; while in Scotland, where centuries of theological life and strife set up even in the Church a notable spirit of “moderation,” both the physical and the moral or social sciences were conspicuously cultivated. Popular freethinking was beginning to follow in both cases, when the reaction against the French Revolution arose to arrest it. When in the next generation there began in Scotland the ecclesiastical struggle which ended in the formation of the Free Church (1842) a new impulse was given to doctrinal fanaticism, which the competition of three rival Presbyterian Churches was well fitted to maintain.

Thus, though Scottish scholars have contributed largely to the “higher criticism,” the middle and working classes of Scotland all through the nineteenth century have been at least outwardly more orthodox than even those of England. They, too, however, have begun to exhibit the common critical tendencies. As the results of Biblical criticism become more generally known, church attendance tends to fall off, despite the economic pressure Churchmen are able to use in small communities. It is perhaps as much on account of the common need as by reason of the growth of liberality that the two chief dissenting Scottish Churches, the Free and the United Presbyterian (Voluntary), have latterly amalgamated. Were it not that a large proportion of the more energetic and stirring youth of the country leave it for England and the colonies, the more conservative staying at home, the process of change would probably be more rapid.

In the small communities of Protestant Switzerland a democratic church polity had equally served to maintain a greater stress of orthodox belief and practice than was seen in surrounding countries; and the appointment of Strauss to a chair of theology at Zurich by a Radical Government in 1839 led to an actual insurrection, set up and led by fanatical clergymen. Catholic cantons later showed themselves no less medieval. Nothing, however, avails to shut out critical thought; Zeller received a chair at Berne in 1847; rationalism has ever since steadily progressed; the number of theological students as steadily falls off; and among the Swiss theologians of to-day are some of the most “subversive” of the professional writers on Christian origins. Popular rationalism necessarily begins to follow, though less rapidly than in countries where the people and the clergy do not ecclesiastically govern themselves.

In Protestant Holland and the Scandinavian States, of late years, the decline of Christian faith has been still more marked. All are considerably influenced by German culture; and in Protestant Germany orthodoxy is gradually disappearing. There the long depression of civilization begun by the troubles of the Reformation, and clinched by the vast calamity of the Thirty Years War, was favourable to a sombre religious feeling; and this, under the name of Pietism, actually prevailed in the latter part of the seventeenth century, triumphing over a movement of spontaneous freethinking. Peace and the development of universities thereafter built up a learned class, who especially cultivated ecclesiastical history; and as we have seen, German theology had become in the primary sense rationalistic by the end of the eighteenth century. After the fall of Napoleon there began in earnest the education of the Prussian common people; and though to this day the learned class are more apart from the general public in Germany than in most other countries, the latter half of the nineteenth century has seen a great development of popular secularism.

In 1881 the church accommodation in Berlin sufficed for only two per cent of the population, and even that was not at all fully used. This is the social aspect of Protestant Germany; and it effectively confutes the periodic statements as to revivals of orthodoxy in the universities. Such revivals are officially engineered and financially stimulated: the mass of the people of Protestant Germany, at least in the towns, have practically given up the Christian creed, even when they do not renounce their nominal membership in the State Church; and the great Socialistic party, which contains over three millions of adult males, is pronouncedly rationalistic. In Scandinavia the literary influence of such masters of drama and fiction as Ibsen and BjÖrnson creates a freethinking spirit on a very wide scale among the middle classes, though the clergy are still illiberal; and in Holland, where the churches are increasingly latitudinarian, there has been a more competent journalistic propaganda of rationalism than in almost any other country.

That the same general movement of things goes on in England may be proved by reference to the almost daily complaints of the clergy. Rationalism and secularism have advanced in all classes during half a century, until their propaganda is accepted as a quite normal activity; such writers as Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and Clifford being read by the more studious of all ranks. In recent years the cheap reprints of the Rationalist Press Association have had millions of readers. Churchgoing constantly declines in the towns; agnosticism becomes more and more common among the educated classes; the average of the workers in the large towns are fixedly alienated from the Church; and the latter-day propaganda of the Salvation Army affects only the less intelligent types even since, after refusing for twenty years to deal with material problems, it has sought to establish itself as a charitable organization for dealing with the “lapsed masses.” As regards the general influence of the churches it is observable that whereas fifty years ago there were many clergymen and prelates noted as important writers on non-theological matters, and whereas even a few years ago there were still several bishops distinguished as scholars and historians, there is now none so describable. So, in the department of fine letters, there is scarcely a poet or novelist of high standing who can be called a believing Christian. In the last generation some distinguished men who were openly heterodox, as the late Mr. Matthew Arnold, or very dubiously orthodox, as Mr. Lecky, were wont to profess themselves good members of the Church of England; but the normal tendency of rationalists is now to give the churches up. The leading names in serious and even imaginative literature, with a few exceptions which stand for popularity rather than weight, are those of known unbelievers. In that category stood the late Mr. George Meredith.

Of the state of thought in the United States it is difficult to speak with precision. The latitude allowed to or taken by the majority of the clergy keeps within the ostensible pale of the numerous churches much opinion that elsewhere would rank as extremely heterodox; and it was from American churchmen that there came the project of the so-called “Rainbow Bible,” in which the heterogeneous sources of the Old Testament books are indicated by printing in variously coloured inks. As in all countries where the clergy are democratically in touch with the people, the breach between authority and modern thought is thus less marked than in the sphere of the Catholic and Anglican Churches. But in such a civilization, development is inevitably continuous.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the prevailing creed of educated New England, then noted for “plain living and high thinking,” was Unitarianism. This seems to have grown rapidly after the Revolution, partly from seed sown by Priestley, who made New England his home, partly from the Deism of the educated class. Nearly all the leaders of the Revolution—Washington, Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams—had been Deists. But Deism is an inconvenient creed for public men in a church-going or clerically-influenced world; and Unitarianism, with its decorous worship and use of the Bible, was a convenient compromise. Later “transcendental” teaching, such as the movement around Emerson, led men in the same direction. Latterly, however, the Unitarian congregations relatively dwindle; and while some of the defection stands for the relapse of the children from the strenuous thought of their fathers, some stands for complete abandonment of the habit of worship.

At the same time popular rationalism has been greatly diffused in the United States by the lecturing of the late Colonel Ingersoll, one of the greatest orators of his time, as was his contemporary Charles Bradlaugh in England. Each of those men probably convinced more of his fellow countrymen of the untruth of the Christian creed than were ever rationally persuaded of its truth by the preachers or teachers of modern times. What preserves the form of faith in the States is probably less the socio-economic pressure seen so commonly in England and Scotland (since all life is franker and freer in the New World, especially in the West) than the simple lack of leisure for study in a community where competition for income drives all men at a pace that almost seems to belie prosperity. A shrewd and pliable clergy keeps itself rather better abreast of new scholarship and criticism than does the mass of the flock; and men and women who first learn from the pulpit something of the change of view passing over Biblical study are not apt to turn away from the teacher as Europeans do from an unteachable priest. But despite all accommodation the sense of an absolute change is diffused, and there is record of western preachers bidding farewell to the pulpit and being chorussed by laymen forsaking the pew.

In strict keeping with the shrinkage of faith among the “higher” races is the expenditure of effort to spread it among the “lower.” Faith naturally seeks the comfort of converts at lower intellectual levels; and it is in some quarters able to report a certain expansion of territory by such means. But the total statistics of Protestant missions tell only of handfuls of converts scattered among the yellow and brown and black races, a number grotesquely disproportionate to the immense outlay. This goes on in virtue of the still sufficient wealth of the churches, which are in consistency bound to respond to missionary appeals while they profess belief in the Christian doctrine of salvation. It is found, however, that the missionary system needs, to maintain it, either an ever more substantial stipend or some other opportunity of gain to the individual missionary; and the triviality of the results becomes increasingly discouraging to all save the most fervent faith. Disparagement of missionary labours on both moral and political grounds is probably more common among professed churchmen than among unbelievers, who sometimes, as in the case of Darwin, bear cordial testimony to the merits and the success of some missionaries as against the egoism of the normal trader in his relations with the undeveloped races.

The final problem of Protestantism is its collective relation to Catholicism; and in the first half of the nineteenth century many Protestants still hoped to gain ground at the expense of the Church of Rome, now that propaganda was free. No such success, however, has taken place. It is found on the contrary that the more devotional types tend to revert from Protestantism to Rome, while those who reject Catholicism rarely become Protestants. In France this is peculiarly apparent. At the Revolution, it was found that proportionally as many Protestant pastors as Catholic priests were ready to abjure their creed. In the religious reaction both Churches alike regained ground; and the Protestant Church in France has always had adherents distinguished for learning and moral earnestness. To-day, however, though its members are relatively numerous in places of political power, by reason doubtless of their serious and practical education, their Church does not make any corresponding gains. Its numbers may not latterly dwindle as steadily as those of the Catholic mass; but there is no prospect that it will recover strength through Catholic defections. In Austria, the anti-Roman movement already mentioned may conceivably give rise to a non-Romish Church; but it is impossible to forecast the issue.

It is the pride of the Greek Church to call itself Orthodox; and in no part of Christendom has the faith had less to fear from unbelief. Mere sectarian strife, indeed, has never been lacking; and at the very moment of the fall of Constantinople there was deadly schism between the orthodox and those who were politically willing to unite with the Latin Church. But vital heresy never throve. Political vicissitude in the Eastern empire, from Constantine onwards, seems always to have thrown the balance of force on the side of religious conservatism; and so devoid is Greek ecclesiastical history since the Middle Ages of any element of innovating life that the student is tempted almost to surmise a national loss of faculty. Greek intellectual life since the fall of Constantinople, however, is only a steady sequence from that which went before. After the overthrow of the Latin kingdom set up by the Crusaders, and the restoration of Greek rule, the whole nation was very naturally thrown back on its traditions, recoiling from further contact with the West; and the process of fixation was repeated for what of Greek life was left after the Turkish conquest. The extraordinary gift for despotic government shown by the first race of Ottoman Turks brought about a resigned degradation on the Christian side. Allowed a sufficient measure of toleration to make them “prefer the domination of the Sultan to that of any Christian potentate,” they paid to him not only their taxes, but, for a time, a large annual tribute of children, with perfect submission; and thus, in the words of the British historian of modern Greece, they “sank with wonderful rapidity, and without an effort, into the most abject slavery.” Many indeed became Mohammedans to escape the tribute of children, which after a time ceased to be exacted, becoming rare in the seventeenth century.

In such circumstances the Christian priesthood and remaining laity were thrown very closely together, somewhat as happened in Ireland under English rule, and the result was a perfect devotion on the part of the Greek peasantry to their creed. It is accordingly claimed as the force which preserved their nationality. But the nationality so preserved could not well do much credit to the creed, which, in turn, gave Greeks a ground of differentiation from their conquerors without supplying any force of retrieval or progress. What was secured was not moral union but merely doctrinal persistence in the state of subjection; and the conqueror “availed himself of the hoary bigotry and infantine vanity of Hellenic dotage to use the Greek Church as a means of enslaving the nation.” The first Sultan sagaciously appointed a conservative Patriarch, and left Christian disputes alone. The result was that the Church was kept impotent by its own quarrels and corruptions. Unity of forms alone remained; simony “became a part of the constitution of the Orthodox Church,” the women of the Sultan’s harem selling Christian ecclesiastical offices; and Christian life as such set up in the Moslem onlookers an immovable contempt. “No more selfish and degraded class of men has ever held power,” says Finlay, “than the archonts of modern Greece and the Phanariots of Constantinople.” Greek life remained at its best in the rural districts, where the old village governments were allowed to subsist, and where accordingly the people kept apart from the corrupt and oppressive Turkish law courts. And in these districts, as it happens, there has been the maximum of pagan survivals.

The Church in particular exhibited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a worse degree, all the corruption and backwardness of that of the West in the pre-Reformation period. Greek monasteries, despite attempts at reform by single emperors, had long been in large measure places of comfortable retreat for members of the upper classes; and under Turkish rule they became still more so, acting however as centres of political intrigue in addition. The result was that, with every facility for such study as the Benedictines carried on in the West, the Greek monks as a rule left learning alone, and were active chiefly as Turkish political agents, in the manner of the Western Jesuits. The secular clergy at the same time became so depressed economically that they were commonly obliged to work with their hands for a living; and though those of the country districts were as a rule morally much superior to those of the towns, all alike were necessarily very ignorant. In the towns, where many of the aristocracy had become Moslems at the conquest, both clergy and monks frequently apostatized to Islam, three cases being recorded in the year 1675; and about that time there is a curious record of the Turks putting a Christian renegade to death for cursing his own religion in the divan. Moslems seem always to have retained a reverence for the Gospel Jesus, considered as apart from his Church.

It is needless to say that Greek Christianity never had the slightest countervailing success in converting Moslems. In addition to the spectacle of Christian degradation constantly under their eyes, the Turks were in a position to say that no trust could ever be put in the good faith of a Christian State which made a treaty with them. Thus even when the usual diseases of despotism and dogmatism corroded the Turkish polity, the Christians counted for nothing as an element either of regeneration or of criticism; and no Turk ever looked to their creed as a possible force of reform, though in the period of energy the ablest Turkish statesman always saw the wisdom of ruling them tolerantly, in the Turkish interest, and sought to win them to Islam. Outside of Greece proper, accordingly, the Greek Church never regained any ground in the Turkish empire; and in the age of the conquest, when the expulsion of Jews from Spain drove many of that race to Turkey, they were everywhere preferred to Christians, whom they ousted, further, from many industrial and commercial positions in the towns, becoming the chief bankers, physicians, and merchants, and so helping to depress the Christians.

No race could under such conditions maintain a high intellectual life; and among Greek Christians orthodoxy was a matter of course. While Venice held the Morea at the end of the seventeenth century, and while Genoa ruled some of the islands, the same state of things prevailed under Catholic rule. When accordingly the sense of nationality began to grow in the eighteenth century, it was from the first associated with the national religion. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Catholic propaganda was carried on in Chios and elsewhere under French auspices, and the Greek Church persuaded the Turkish Government to prohibit proselytism. At no period does the strife between easterns and westerns at the Holy Sepulchre seem to have ceased; and it now began to worsen. The wars between Austria and Turkey, however, began the gradual emancipation of the Greek people from servitude, by putting an outside pressure on the Turkish Government; the Russians continued the process; and the new friendly relations now set up between Greek and other Christians developed a new Greek sentiment of racial hostility to the Turks. At the same time, the hostility of the Christian powers made the Porte inclined to attach the Greek upper class by giving them privileges as Turkish officials, and thus the national self-respect was on that side further encouraged, despite the corruption of the favoured class. Probably Russian influence in the eighteenth century did most to arouse national aspirations, Russia being specially welcome as holding the Greek form of Christianity; but the Russian attempt to secure sovereignty as the price of military help checked the movement for independence; and it needed the contagion of the French revolutionary movement to cause a vigorous revival. Then Russia on political grounds combined with the Porte to resist French influence from the Levant and the Ionian islands; and when in 1815 the revived Ionian Republic was placed under British protection, Russia and Turkey continued to combine in jealousy of Western influence.

English rule in the Ionian Islands in turn was “neither wise nor liberal,” and while it subsisted did nothing for Greek development; but it remains the fact that Russia, holding the Greek creed, never aimed sympathetically at Greek liberation. That came about at length through the fervour of national feeling set up at the French Revolution and encouraged by a common European sympathy, grounded not on religion but on admiration for ancient and pagan Greece as the great exemplar of civilization and intellectual life. The same admiration for their ancestors was naturally aroused among the Greeks themselves, and was their strongest political impulse. “Ecclesiastical ties greatly facilitated union, but they neither created the impulse towards independence, nor infused the enthusiasm which secured success.”

Since the achievement of Greek independence, however, the people have remained substantially orthodox. Though they are no longer withheld from intercourse with the West, but have on the contrary shown a large measure of cosmopolitanism, their intellectual life has remained relatively fixed till the other day, the new complacency of independence backing the old complacency of orthodoxy. An excessive devotion to politics and political intrigue has absorbed the mental activity of the people; and literary veneration for the classic past has hampered the free play of intelligence on higher problems. The “Gospel Riots” at Athens a dozen years ago exhibited the state of real culture. On the urging of the Queen there had been made a translation of the New Testament into the living language of the people, or into one midway between that and the artificial academic tongue which has been developed among the literary class. About that period, however, what appears to be a more truly vernacular version began to be published in an Athenian journal; and it was against this that the students and others concerned directed their indignation, bringing about by their disturbances an actual change of ministry. Orthodox sentiment and orthodox ignorance appeared to be the moving forces; so that at the beginning of the twentieth century Greece could claim to be the most bigoted of Christian countries. Doubtless the consciousness of possessing the continuous apostolic tradition has been an important psychological factor in the special conservatism of belief, as is literary past-worship in the conservatism of speech.

When we turn to Russia, where the creed of the Greek Church, though under an independent Patriarch, is that of the State, we find the usual phenomena of European intellectual life specially marked. In no other country, perhaps, is rationalism or indifference more nearly universal among the educated class, which is relatively small; and nowhere is faith more uncritical among the mass. Among them the use and adoration of icons—pictures or images of Jesus or the Madonna or of the saints, embellished in various ways—is universal in both private and public devotion; and a certain number of images, credited with miraculous virtue, earn great revenues for the monasteries or churches which possess them. The mass of the parish clergy (who like those of Greece may marry before ordination, but not a second time) are so ignorant as to be unconcerned about educated unbelief; and the Church as a whole has little or no political influence, being thoroughly subject to the political administration, or at least to the authority of the Tsar.

In the medieval period monasteries in Russia underwent the same evolution as elsewhere, the monks passing from poverty to corporate wealth, and owning in particular multitudes of serfs. Their lands and serfs, however, were secularized in the eighteenth century; and since then, though some five hundred monasteries continue to exist, they have counted for little in the national life. Ecclesiastical discipline has in general been always rigorous under the autocracy; and in the eighteenth century it was common to flog priests cruelly for almost any breach of discipline. And though Russia has for ages abounded in dissenting sects, at no time has any movement of reform come from the clergy. No Church has been more steadily unintellectual. All progress in Russia has come from the stimulus of western culture, beginning under Peter the Great, and continuing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and though some men of genius, as the great novelist, Dostoyevsky, who was anti-rationalist, and Count Tolstoy, who was heretically religious, have been exceptions to the rule, the higher Russian culture is predominantly rationalistic. The greatest Russian novelist, TourguÉnief, was a freethinker, as is Gorky to-day.

The numerous dissident sects of Russia, which represent in general unorganized developments of the spirit of Bible-worshipping Protestantism, have been broadly classed as follows: (1) Sects such as the Molokani and Stundists, which found on the Scriptures, but are not literalists, and resort at times to inward light for interpretation. (2) Sects which disregard Scripture, and follow the doctrine of special leaders. (3) Sects which believe in the re-incarnation of Christ. (4) Sects given to the religion of physical excitement; some being erotic, as the Jumpers; some flagellant, as the Khlysti; some fanatically ascetic, as the Skoptsi or Eunuchs. All alike, however near they may be to orthodoxy, are liable to official persecution equally with the members of the modern sect of Dukhobortsi, associated with Count Tolstoy, whose doctrine is non-resistance and refusal to bear arms. Thus Christianity in Russia is variously identified with the most medieval formalism and bigotry and the most exalted enthusiasm for concord; while the march of intelligence proceeds as far as it may in disregard of all supernaturalist creeds. But the vast mass of the Russian peasantry stands for the faith of the Middle Ages, and may now be said to constitute the most religious section of total Christendom.

Between eastern and western Christianity, finally, there seems to be no prospect of ecclesiastical fraternization, though hopes of that kind have been sometimes floated in the Anglican Church. At the church of the Holy Sepulchre the Greeks and the Latins are in chronic strife; it was one of their squabbles that brought about the Crimean War; and in the present year they have shed blood in one of their scuffles.1 The visitor to Jerusalem thus witnesses the standing spectacle of an impassive Turkish soldier keeping the peace between mobs of Christian devotees, eager to fly at each other’s throats.