Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/36

 of the gold-bedecked bishop, nor any obligation upon the congregation to maintain dead silence (in Poland men and women join their prayers with those of the priest with such fervour as to endanger the flickering lights of the tapers). But, above all, the inflexible dogma of the old language, an unintelligible Latin, the sonorous syllables of which resound like the ancient words of command of the armies of once glorious Rome. Here no particularism can be allowed, whereas individuality is always permissible in the East.

A province gained for Christianity in the West was a new conquest for the Pope and it was administered after the same principles as the older ones. Germany did not remain under the rule of missionaries like St. Boniface or St. Columba; Rome decided all its future. In the region of the Danube, after Latin missionaries appeared to preach to a Latin-speaking population which had possessed, even from the time of Trajan, the seeds of Christianity, the new members of the Church had an extended latitude to organise and administer their religion for themselves. As the emperor no longer held sway, as no barbarian king could be employed for the ends of the Church, what happened in the political field was bound also to occur in the domain of the church.

Danubian Roumania was a country of autonomous villages ruled in the popular manner. Religiously it was a country of priests, a presbyterocracy instead of a State governed by a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops as in the West.

The priest, hereditary of office, consacrated by the superior of the monastery or by a neighbouring bishop, led his spiritual flock unsupervised by any. The State, as in Wallachia, could call a foreign bishop and bring him to its capital or, as in Moldavia, ask Byzantium for the recognition