Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/42

 holy office: what was at first the mere and casual imitation of a heretic novelty (of the Hussites, and later of the Lutherans in Transylvania and of the Calvinists sustained by the Hungarian princes of the province) later became the rule for all churches in both principalities, from the humblest village church to the cathedrals of the two capitals. Understanding the Gospel, the Apostles, the hymns of the Liturgy, the peasants loved more than ever before the church which did not disdain to bring to their level the truths of the faith and the consolations of the Holy Gospel. In effect, the Roumanian orthodoxy, free from internal dissensions and unfettered by a foreign language or, as with the Slavs, by an archaic form of a forgotten dialect, was a popular protestantism bound to the conservatism of the eastern creed and bearing some resemblances to the Greek and Slav orthodoxies.

Not the creator of the Roumanian soul, but merely its everyday sustainer and helper, the church was closely connected to the national life, identifying itself with the very development of the society it served. Church and nation formed a single body as long as neither sought aspirations beyond the national borders.

The Roumanian orthodoxy could not enslave the Roumanian nation to the Greeks, who were indebted to the former. All later attempts to bring Greek bishops to the Sees of Moldavia and Wallachia have utterly failed. In the former of the principalities, after just such an attempt, a general decision was woted forbidding the election of foreigners. In Wallachia certain Greek bishops ruled, such as Lukas, previously Bishop of Buzău, the Cretan Neophytos, later Galaction of Râmnic, the Metropolitan Nectarius, the brothers Philites, without taking account of a bishop of Arta introduced under the Russian occupation of 1812, but they were