Page:Destruction of the Greek Empire.djvu/499

 APPENDIX IV 453 philosophy, men and women were led by their religion to be more moral, more honest, and more kindly one to another, than they would otherwise have been. The denunciations of those who had been guilty of unclean conduct, and the constant praise of almsgiving, lead to the conclusion that the Church had so far exercised influence for good. It had given the citizens of the empire a higher standard of family and social life. The very stubbornness which the Asiatic tendency supplied, and which led all to resist every attempt to change the formulas of the faith, came in itself to stand the population in good stead after 1453. Their wranglings on religious questions helped to form a public opinion which prevented any considerable number of Christians from abandoning their religion. We may safely conclude, therefore, that the Orthodox Church had aided in developing intellectual life, in raising and maintaining a high tone of morality, and in so attaching its members to their religion that when the time of trial came they remained faithful. It had done more. While accomplishing these objects it had raised a whole series of heterogeneous races to a higher level of civilisation and had largely contributed to make the empire the foremost and best educated state in Europe. It had checked the Greek tendency to attachment merely to the city or province and had made patriotism and brotherhood words of wider signification than they possessed in Greece. It is when we pass from the influence of the Church on the conduct of the individual, to ask what was the value of its ethical teaching in regard to national life, whether it ever set before the nation a lofty national ideal, or whether it ever caused a wave of religious enthusiasm which influenced the nation as a whole, that we find the Orthodox Church during the later centuries of its history greatly lacking. Eeligion was to guide the conduct of the individual and to save him from eternal punishment. There was little or no conception of it as an aid to national righteousness. There was no inspiration for national action, such as a study of the Old Testament has often supplied. There was never any great religious fervour for the accomplishment of an object because it was believed to be the divine will. I am not thinking of such religious enthusiasm as led to the abolition of the slave trade or of slavery, to the temperance movement or to that for the diminution of crime and the reform of criminals or for the bettering the condition of the labouring classes and the like. These are social developments belonging to later years, which may be credited, in part at least, to the account of Christianity. It is in the contemporary religious movements of other portions