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 452 DESTRUCTION OF THE GEEEK EMPIRE and, as far as the believers could accomplish it, in this also. Unless the eagerness, the passion, the deadly Asiatic earnestness of the religious discussions or wranglings be realised, no true conception can be formed of fourteenth and fifteenth century life in Constantinople. Contemporary writers supply abundant and indisputable evidence that, from the patriarch downwards, the members of the Greek Church attached overwhelming importance to the correct- ness of their orthodoxy. The utmost care about correct definitions was taken by the Church to check paganism. The miscreant was a worse offender than the man who disregarded the ordinary laws of morality. Souls were to be saved by right belief. As in the Western Church, whosoever would be saved, it was necessary before all things that he should accept the right formulas. But the Eastern gave greater prominence to the formulas than even the Western. While the Roman Church attached most importance to its Catholicity and to the necessity of propagating the faith, the Greek Church always prided itself rather on its Orthodoxy. If the question were whether the empire was Christian, and if the test of being a Christian nation were the jealous guardianship of every dogma in the precise manner that it had been formulated by the Councils of the Church, then the Orthodox Church, to which the inhabitants of the capital and empire belonged, would take a very high rank among Christian nations. It is not possible to doubt that the keen interest taken in the discussion of religious questions quickened the intellectual development of the population, and in this respect the influence of the Church was purely beneficial. To suggest, as did the historians of the eighteenth century, that the Greeks were at once profoundly theological and profoundly vile is not only to ask that an indict- ment should be framed against a whole people, but is contrary to general experience and to fact. In spite of the occasional con- junction of theology and immorality in the same individual, the nation which takes a lively interest in the former is not likely to be addicted to the latter. A strong and, I think, an unanswerable case might be made out to show that the religion of the Orthodox Church beneficially influenced the conduct of men and women in their individual capacity and in their relations one with another. All believed in the doctrine of eternal punishment and in the divine gifts granted to the Church by which punishment might be avoided. In then- constant efforts to take advantage of the graces at the disposal of the Church, and in their endeavours to attain the ideal of Christian