Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/38

 1 6 CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. of the Greeks during the Byzantine era has been neglected by the schools in Western Europe. The hostility toward the Orthodox Church was extended to the Greeks and the liv- ing Greek language. Thus we see that the church on the one hand helped to preserve the old Greek language, and, on the other hand, was indirectly the cause that living Greek was condemned, despised, calumniated. The world is full of wrong and misery caused by religious dissension. It is about time that our schools turned their attention to the history of Byzantine Greece. While German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish history are treated with due considera- tion, Byzantine history is restricted to a few para- graphs only, and these so brief that no satisfac- tory understanding is possible. The close relation of the middle Greek lan- guage with the old Greek is evident. There is hardly any branch of classical philology which is not enlightened by the study of the Byzan- tines. Even the vulgar Greek, the dialects, and the dialects severally, as we shall see later on, have proved to be essential and important parts of the history of the Greek language. This has been fully demonstrated by a number