Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/169

Rh council of Basel. As on former occasions the Greeks were at first deceived by false representations ; they were betrayed into recognition of papal supremacy, and tricked into signing what could afterwards be represented as a submission to Western doctrine. The natural consequences followed, a repudiation of what had been done ; and the Greek bishops on their way home took care to make emphatic their ritual istic differences from Rome. Soon after came the fall of Constantinople, and with this event an end to the political reasons for the submission of the Greek clergy. Rome s schemes for a union which meant an unconditional submis sion on the part of the Greeks did not cease, however, but they were no longer attempted on a grand scale. Jesuit missionaries after the Reformation stirred up schisms in some parts of the Eastern Church, and in Austria and Poland many of the Greeks were compelled to submit them selves to the se e of Rome. The result of these schemes has been what is called the U/iia, or the United Greeks. These various unions have commonly arisen from dissensions among the Greeks themselves when a portion of the dis sentients have made submission to Rome. Rome commonly promised to allow them to enjoy their own liturgies and rites of worship, but usually broke her promises. This was done so systematically that the college of the Propaganda prints what profess to be the old liturgies of the Eastern churches, which are really so interpolated as to bring them surreptitiously into harmony with the Western rites. This is done so universally that it is impossible to trust to any professedly Eastern creed or service-book printed at the office of the Propaganda in Rome.

Differentiation of National Churches included in the Orthodox Greek Church.&mdash;Mr Finlay, in his History of Greece, has shown that there has been always a very close relation between the church and national life. Christianity from the first connected itself with the social organization of the people, and therefore iu every province assumed the language and the usages of the locality. In this way it was able to command at once individual attachment and universal power. This feeling died down to some extent when Constantine made use of the church to consolidate his empire. But it revived under the persecution of the A rian emperors. The struggle against Arianism was not merely a struggle for orthodoxy. Athanasius was really at the head of a national Greek party resisting the domina tion of a Latin-speaking court. From this time onwards Greek patriotism and Greek orthodoxy have bsen almost convertible terms, and this led naturally to revolts against Greek supremacy in the days of Justinian and other em perors. Dean Stanley is probably correct when he describes the heretical churches of the East as the ancient national churches of Egypt, Syria, and Armenia in revolt against supposed innovations in the earlier faith imposed on them by Greek supremacy. In the East, as in Scotland, the history of the church is the key to the history of the nation, and in the freedom of the church the Greek saw the freedom and supremacy of his race. For this very reason Orthodox Eastern Christians of alien race felt compelled to resist Greek domination by means of independent ecclesiastical organization, and the structure of the church rather favoured than interfered with the coexistence of separate national churches professing the same faith. Another circumstance favoured the creation of separate national churches. While the Greek empire lasted the Greek emperors had a right of investiture on the election of a new patriarch, and this right was retained by the Turkish sultans after the conquest of Constantinople. The Russian people, for example, could not contemplate with calmness as the head of their church a bishop appointed by the hereditary enemy of their country. In this way the jealousies of race and the necessities of nations have produced various national churches which are independent or autocephalous, and yet are one in doctrine with the Orthodox Greek Church. The most important of these are the churches of Russia, Georgia, Servia, Roumania, Greece, and Montenegro. The churches of Russia and Georgia have been united.

