Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/64

 of Transylvania to maintain the resistance against the act of union, hater Athanasius was degraded to be a simple bishop, transported to the rural district, of Făgăraș from the capital, and there subjected to the authority of a foreign Jesuit. His successors were wholly neglected, and the most important of all Uniate bishops, Innocent Micu-Klein, having asked for the promised rights of his nation, was insulted in the Transylvanian assembly by the representatives of the leading nations. Being in danger of arrest in Vienna, he sought satisfaction in Rome, only to die in poverty, while the revolt of the orthodox peasantry broke forth under the leadership of a courageous village priest, whose inspiration led them far beyond the goal of religious grievances into the domains of ideals of social freedom for the nation.

The Court of Vienna eventually consented to send a religious chief to these numerous and indomitable malcontents — a Serb who was at the same time bishop of the Serbs in Buda and in the lower Austrian provinces, hiving under the thatched roof of a humble cottage near Hermannstadt (Sibiiu) he had, in the same lowly condition, two Serb successors, until in the year 1810 the Roumanian Basil Moga assumed their office. After him a greater personality, Andrew Șaguna, was to add much lustre to this church of the furthest ranges, and to gain for her the dignities of archbishop and Metropolitan from the Emperor Franz Joseph.

Cut off from the great masses of the nation, regarded as mere tools of the Court, the successors of Klein, Peter Paul Aaron the mystic, the great organiser Bobb, brought no gains of consequence to the fight for Catholic expansion in Transylvania. Secluded in their modest stronghold of Blaj, practically the prisoners of the Government, playing, with their excellent national schools, merely a cultural role,