1829.J The Greek Church. 635 



it ; with final ruin was brought upon the Greek empire. A " nation of 

 a strange speech," coming from a remote land, with a strange religion, 

 and a rage of prey and blood, less hke the passions of mail than the 

 instincts of the lion and the tiger, the Saracen, was summoned from 

 the wilderness against them, and the empire of the Constantines was 

 reduced to a single city. 



A respite was then given, as if for the purpose of displaying to the 

 world the long suffering of the divine justice. Constantinople stood for 

 six hundred years almost within the hourly sight of her enemies. — The 

 weakest of States perpetually insulted by the presence of some fierce 

 invader, or the possession of some fierce ally, yet still retaining a 

 painful supremacy. At last, the hour of her fall came. A new scourge 

 was summoned from the ncyth of Asia. The Turk was let loose from 

 the summits of the Caucasus, like one of their own torrents. He swept 

 avi'ay the feeble resistance of the last force o^ the empire, and in the 

 memorable year 1453, entered Constantinople over the body of the last 

 of her emperors. 



This tremendous ovei-throw might have been, in other times, the source 

 of jjurification to the Greek religion. The abuses created by the opu- 

 lence of its church, might have expired with that opulence ; and 

 adversity working upon nations, as it sometimes does upon men, might 

 have been the parent of reformation. 



But it is a striking feature in the false religion which had so deeply 

 usurped the place of the true in the empire, that the Scriptures had 

 been long withdrawn from the study of the people. In Rome this had 

 been the result of a direct ordinance. In Constantinople it had been 

 the result of a general system of elevating the priesthood into the rank 

 of beings midway between man and the Deity, less, ministers of worship, 

 than mediators between earth and Heaven. The unquestionable fact 

 was, that the Scriptures had fallen into neglect, until the attempt of the 

 laity to possess them was declared an act of treason. The bloody 

 persecution, and merciless exile of the people afterwards called 

 Bulgarians, and who were the parents of the great Christian reformation 

 in the thirteenth century, was the immediate consequence of a demand 

 for the public use of the Scriptures. 



The Greek church, thus without the only light that could guide it, was 

 reduced by the loss of its opulence only into naked barbarism. Its 

 learning perished, its splendour was exchanged for a rude ceremonial, 

 and the hold which it had lost in the loss of its magnificent temples, its 

 priestly pomp, and the conflux of noble worshippers from the ends of 

 Europe and Asia, was now to be retained only by more audacious juggling, 

 and grosser and more perpetual appeals to the appetites and fears of 

 an utterly ignorant population. 



But the grasping dominion of Rome had not overlooked the weakness 

 of the Greek church, even previously to the fall of Constantinople. 

 The Pope, all-powerful in the west, was determined to bring the patri- 

 archates of the east under his sceptre, and overtures were made to the 

 Greek emperor for his submission to the haughty successor of St. Peter. 

 The time was one of Greek peril, for tlie Turks had already approached 

 the walls of his capital ; and the Pope's protection would have been 

 equivalent to the promise of the whole force of the western kingdoms 

 raised in arms for the defence of his new subject. 



A General Council was consequently held at Florence in 1439. The 



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