Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/141

Rh (for this it really was) imposed by the Ottoman Turk, not only substituting will for law, but mutilating the sacred structure of the family, and clothing the excesses of tyrannical power with the awful sanctions of religion, was such as to take away even half the remaining virtue of a slave. It seems indisputable that the effect was to corrode very seriously the character of the race. The fetter that eats into the flesh eats also into the soul. God made man free, yet doubtless in foresight of the mischiefs that would result from the abuse of freedom. The abuse of it is fault and guilt, but the loss of it is mutilation. Under Ottoman rule, and in exact proportion as it was unqualified and unresisted, together with intellectual, moral, and domestic life, the sense of nationality, and the desire of recovery, sank to the lowest ebb.

One treasure only remained to the Greek through the long night of his desolation; it was "the pearl of great price." Setting aside the involuntary victims of the children-tribute, only a most insignificant minority of the Christain races, or at least of the greater part of them, submitted to purchase by apostasy immunity from suffering, with free access to the pleasures and advantages of life; especially to that most intoxicating and corrupting pleasure, the power of simple domineering over our fellow-creatures. That faith, which ought to bear fruit in the forms of all things fair and noble and humane, shrank into itself, as it often shrinks in cases less unhappy; and slept through the icy winter of many generations. But a twinkling light still marked the habitation it had not deserted; and it abode its time, bearing within itself the capacity and promise of a resurrection to come. While we admit and deplore the deep gloom of ignorance, and the widespread ravages of demoralization, let there also be a word of tribute rendered to the virtue of one heroic endurance and persistency, which is without parallel in the history of Christendom.

If we look to the means by which this great result was achieved, I cannot but assign the utmost value to the fact that even the popular services of the Eastern Church appear to be profusely charged with matter directly drawn from Scripture, and that access was thus given to a fountain of living waters, even where the voice of the preacher was unheard, and books were almost unknown. Thus the ministration of the Christian rites was kept in some relation with that action of the human intelligence, which they encourage and presuppose. But I think that the impartial student of history must also admit that, in these dismal circumstances, the firmly knit organization of the Christian clergy rendered an inestimable service, in helping the great work of conservation. And it is not without interest to remark how many circumstances favor the belief that in this work the largest share belonged not to the monk in his cloister, or the bishop on his throne, but to the secular, or, as they are now called, the working clergy. The institution of marriage made and kept them citizens as fully as the members of their flocks: and "chill poverty," if it "repressed their noble rage," removed them from the temptations, to which the higher clergy were exposed by their often close and questionable relations with Constantinople. Mr. Finlay, who has exposed the results of this contact with, to say the least, an unsparing hand, has nevertheless placed upon record the following remarkable judgment: —


 * The parish priests had an influence on the fate of Greece quite incommensurate with their social rank. The reverence of, the peasantry for their Church was increased by the feeling that their own misfortunes were shared by the secular clergy. . . . To their conduct we must surely attribute the confidence, which the agricultural population retained in the promises of the gospel, and their firm persistence in a persecuted faith. The grace of God operated by human means to preserve Christianity under the domination of the Ottomans.

Let us now consider how the door of hope was opened, and the opening gradually widened, for the race. The decay and extinction of the children-tribute, in the seventeenth century, is to be considered as the removal of an insurmountable obstacle to all recovery. The contact with Venice, even in political subordination, maintained variously at various times and never wholly lost in the (so-called) Ionian Islands until the extinction of the long-lived republic, may at least have tended to maintain some sense of a common life, and common interests, with the rest of Christendom. The gradual loss by the Turks of their military supremacy was at least a negative advantage, a remote source of hope, to those whom they held in servitude. Some admissions, too, must be