as the sixth century, remained unknown. To this day the liturgy is never celebrated in the Eastern Church without incense and singing, and the length of the rite and difficulty of providing the necessary ceremonial render the celebration far less frequent than in the West. The custom of observing a very rigid fast 1 for a week before receiving the Holy Communion, a custom which originated in Lent and Advent, reduced the primitive weekly communion to a communion four times a year among the Slavs, and to once a year among the Rumanians. Such comparatively modern rites as Exposition and Benediction of the blessed Sacrament remain unknown, and though the Sacrament is reserved upon the altar hidden behind the curtain in the iconostasis, the devotion of the worshipper is quickened more by the sacred pictures than by a recollection of the adorable presence.

This Conservatism in worship and practice has sometimes tempted western Christians to speak of Eastern Orthodox Christianity as fossilized, or to describe its dogmas as 'flies in amber'. That is an unwise and hasty judgement. Eastern Orthodoxy has never ceased to be moulded by the central doctrine of Christianity, the Incarnation of the Son of God, and by the truth that we are made partakers of Christ, the God-Man. A deep reverence is felt for the Gospels. And we shall not find it hard to sympathize with the Eastern who thinks that western worship appeals either too much to the eyes or too much to the head, while his cwn liturgy, mysterious and half concealed, with its frequent pathetic supplications, appeals to the heart. His devotion to dogmatism is by no means excessive. It is true that the Oriental cannot conceive of a full Christian intercommunion in the sacraments which is not cemented by an agreement in doctrine; but the Oriental mind is averse from a minute

1 Among Orthodox Easterns fasting implies abstinence from meat, eggs, butter, oil, cheese, all kinds of fish among the Slavs, and nearly all kinds among the Greeks.

...

definiteness in dogma. This aversion is most marked in the case of the Russians. An acute French writer observes, 'The Latin defines and catalogues the divine as he defines and catalogues himself; it is a physiological necessity . . . accustom the Russian to definitions of which the Latin cannot have enough, and you will only arrive at making him doubt a truth which he can only grasp with his heart. The Latin has such a horror of human mysteries that he is obliged to penetrate into the mysteries of God as far as reason can take him; the Russian is so at ease in mysteries of every kind that to explain them makes them less real to him.'1 And we who are not French or Latin need to come into contact with eastern Christians if we wish to understand how deeply our national and religious temperament has been influenced by a civilization which is essentially Roman.

The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 left Moscow as the great centre of eastern Christianity. The patriarchates of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch, though they survive to this day, had long been trodden under the feet of the Moslem. Serbia was to fall a few years later than Constantinople. Most of us, unless we are historians by profession, have forgotten the fear of the Turks, as we have forgotten the earlier fear of the Tartars. It would have been an ever-present fear to us if we had been alive when Luther rebelled against Rome. For in the year when Luther burnt the Pope's bull Suleiman the Magnificent ascended the throne of Turkey, and he reigned from Bagdad to Algiers and from Cairo to Belgrad and Buda-Pesth. The hapless eastern Christians might indeed ask themselves whether God was not on the side of the victorious sultan, and of the false prophet, whose religion is only

1 J. Wilbois, L'Avenir de l'Église Russe, English translation by C. R. Davey Biggs, Russia and Reunion, pp. 126, 127 (A. R. Mowbray & Co., London, 1908)

a parody, though a serious parody, of the Christian faith. Apostasy was well rewarded. In Bosnia, after the wholesale massacres which established Turkish rule, the Slavonic aristocracy, who had been for the most part members of the strange semi-Christian sect of the Bogomili, accepted Islam, and their descendants have remained rich and undisturbed. In Constantinople, when a Christian of good position became a proselyte, he was led on horseback through the streets as one whom the king delighted to honour, and provision was made for his support, whether he were priest or layman. The policy of exterminating Christians has only been systematically followed by the Turks during the last forty years. During the decadence of the Church which inevitably followed the establishment of Turkish rule the number of renegades was considerable. But it is a matter for legitimate surprise that it was not infinitely greater and that in European Turkey the crescent never broke the Cross.

The sultans soon saw the advantage of having the highest ranks of the clergy on their side and under their hand. They could afford to treat the Patriarch with every honour if through him they could both tax and tame the whole Orthodox community and keep alive a jealous dislike of western Christendom. At the first, therefore, the Patriarch of Constantinople, as the head of a great community, enjoyed more power than he enjoyed under a Christian sovereign, and he began to wear on his brow a jewelled crown similar to that of the departed emperors. He was nevertheless an instrument of slavery and extortion. The Turks lived by fighting, and their intention was to maintain a warrior class on the basis of a subject population. This enslaved population had to fulfil three primary duties. First, they had to till the land for feudal landowners, the fiefs not being hereditary, but held directly from the sultan. Secondly, they had to pay taxes, especially a capitation

tax paid by every non-Moslem. Thirdly, they had to pay the tribute of boys. Every four years the officers of the sultan made a selection of the male Christian children in Turkey between the ages of six and nine. These children were then circumcised, taught the faith of Islam, and in most cases enrolled in the corps of Janissaries. This inhuman practice sometimes turned to the advantage of the Christians, for the renegades occasionally dealt kindly with the people of their own race. A notable instance is the Serbian boy who was taken to Constantinople, became Grand Vizier, and was known by the name of Mechmed Sokolović. He was a strict Moslem, and in Constantinople he turned the church of St. Anastasia into a mosque. But he never lost his love for Serbia, and under his protection his brother, the Serbian Patriarch Makarije I (1557-1574), was able to restore several of the exquisite churches and monasteries of Serbia, some of which had been built when the Turks were at the very gates of Prince Lazar's dominions.

But, as a rule, in the latter part of the sixteenth century and during the greater part of the seventeenth, the position of the Church was desperate both in the cities and in the rural districts. Enormous sums were extorted from each Patriarch-elect at Constantinople, sums which had to be collected from the people by demanding fees for the offices of religion. Only by huge donations to the sultans were a few of the churches saved from being converted into mosques.1 Even so, they were only rescued for a time, for the Greeks lost every ancient church in Constantinople except one small building, the Panagia Muchliotissa, built by the Greek princess Mary, daughter of Manuel Palaeologus, who became the bride of a Mongol Khan. In Serbia and

The Christians were not allowed to build any new churches. After some great fires in 1660 when many churches in Galata and Constantinople were burned, the churches were rebuilt by the Christians but immediately destroyed by the Turks. See Paul Rycaut, State of the Ottoman Empire, p. 103 (London, 1670).

Macedonia, when the Moslem law against building new churches was enforced, the Christians tried to conceal them by building them partly underground, and the practice of making semi-subterranean churches survived until the beginning of this century. In one point the example of the Turks may be commended. They appreciated the beauty of the churches of Constantinople and the skill of the native Greek and Armenian architects. And for mosque after mosque, from that of Mohammed the Conqueror in Constantinople to that built in the nineteenth century in the citadel of Cairo, they employed architects of Christian race to design buildings wholly different from the primitive temples of Islam and almost purely Byzantine in their plan. Greatest among these mosques is that designed by the Armenian Sinan for Suleiman that it might surpass Justinian's church of Saint Sophia, and the other mosque erected by Sinan for the Sultan Selim at Adrianople. Why, we may ask, have we Christians built in India churches inartistic, exotic, and unsuited to the climate, when Indian art would lend itself to a style as delicate and appropriate as that of the churches of eastern Europe?

The Eastern Church was quickly affected by the Reformation. As early as 1559 Melanchthon opened a correspondence with the Patriarch Joasaph II with a view to promoting union between the Lutherans and the Orthodox, and between 1573 and 1581 there was a correspondence between the theologians of Tübingen and the Patriarch Jeremiah II. These theologians, like Melanchthon, desired an approximation as well as information. A controversy began which Jeremiah saw to be futile, and he finally asked them to write about friendship and not about dogma. More strange and pitiful is the story of Cyril Lucaris, Patriarch of Alexandria and afterwards of Constantinople (d. 1637). Living at the very darkest period of his Church's history, when the