LAND & WATER 
January 31, 
1918 
religion, and the Polish tradition with it, goes right up to th 
old boundary upon tlie i6th degree of longitude East of 
(ireenwich. 
You have the same thing in Silesia, the theatre of the most 
impudent and shameless of Prussian aggressions in the past. 
The German speech extends over the old border by a belt of 
from 15 to 20 miles broad to-day ; but that belt has lost 
neither" its traditional religion nor at bottom its traditional 
nationalitv. It is Polish. 
Again, the contrast between the Uniate Roumanian and the 
f)rthod().\- Roumanian is a real one, though the greatest experts 
will difter— according to their i^rsonnl sympathies -upon its 
degree A " L'niate " is one who has the Byzantine rite. 
that is, whose language, ornaments, castoms, etc., in the ser\'icf 
of the Mass are those of the Greek church, but who is m com- 
jnunion with Rome liverj-one will admit the strength of Rou- 
manian national feeling, biit it remains tnie that some genera- 
tions of Uniate practice— that is of communion with Rome— 
on the part of Roumanians lying within the old boundaries of 
the Hungarian Kingdom, "is a disturbing factor. NVhen 
nationality and religion are coterminous, the religious differ- 
ences of this eastern belt are a most vivid index of differentia- 
tion, and this is. of course, especially the case along the 
frontier which divides the two religions between Poland and 
the Russian peoples to the east. 
Anyone visiting Warsaw before the war had liefore his 
yes an excellent proof of what 1 mean. What did the Russian 
.lovernment do to symbolise its part in the partition of 
I'oland ? What was the visible sign of its presence in the 
]*olisli capital ? A new brilliantly coloured huge Orthodox 
Church built in the centre of the' town and in its principal 
square, and contrasting most violently with all the archi- 
tectural and religious traditions of the place. It was a 
sort of challenge which nobody could miss, and it was 
intended for such a challenge. "The two religions were the 
two hall marks of the fiercely contending forces. The Poles 
emphasised their Western culture and tradition by a worship, 
a Church ornament and architecture almost Italian. I have 
been to Mass in Warsaw in a Church where one might 
forget that one was hundreds of miles to the north and to the 
east of Italy. One might have been in Tuscany. I do not 
mean only that the ritual was I.^tin and therefore, of course, 
e.xactly homogeneous with the Roman ritual all over Europe ; 
I mean, that down to the details of ornament aixd shrine the 
thing was entirely Western. Entering an Orthodox Church 
you enter another world, a world of different colour and 
different shapes entirely. , 
To the south of that belt between the Balkans and the 
Baltic the test imposed by religious differences changes in 
character, but increases if anything in intensity. Thus side 
by side with the Uniate and the Latin rite in the Carpathians 
you have the strongly Lutheran character of the German towns 
planted out like Colonies— "Heimanstadt, for instance. You 
have the Orthodox contrasted with the Catholic within the 
boundaries of what is racially cme Southern Slav and Serbian 
people, and as you proceed further southwards you have the 
anomaly or survival^upon a very considerable scale — of the 
Mahommedan. Consider, for instraiice, what is experienced 
by the tra\-eller who ventures among the Albanian tribes. 
In one day's ride he will pass (they are mixed everywhere, 
but I am talking of the bulk orf the people) from a Mahom- 
medan group south of the l^ke of Scutari round east- 
ward through Catholic villages and up north again into the 
higher hills of Orthodox Mom:enegro. Leave the Upper 
Adriatic coast and strike, into the mountains of the Save basin ; 
you pass through a Cathohc district, through an Orthodox 
one ; far north as you are, when you come down on to the 
Uno Valley* you will find a little island of Mahommedans living 
apart. In the Lower Danube, especially in the Dobrudja, 
you find the same contrast, the Orthodox intermixed with 
the Mahommedan. You find it ijt the south-western corner of 
Old Serbia ; and of course in all these lands, the chief his- 
torical memory of which is the no^v lost Turkish rule, religion 
is the badge and hall mark. 
In general, we must think of religion evcrj'where east of the 
German block as the great mark of difference, in most places 
more important than speech ; in many more important even 
than race. 
Now let us turn to the map itself and appreciate what the 
territorial complexity of this religious patchwork is. 
There are two great divisions in the religious world east of 
the German block. These divisions are, of course, the group 
in communion with Rome and tlie group of the Greek Church. 
We are accustomed to think in tilie West of a comparatively 
simple distinction between the (ireek Church to the east of a 
^ertain line and the Catholics to the west of it. Roughly 
jj>eakmg, this distinction holds, bat it is far from having the 
„»,iL'!f'T '^f-^^':'\ ^^'''- t'^f n»<»t nor '.hc-rn of flie isolated Mahom- 
medan (listncts with an "M on the man. 
f^^imphcity which general educated opinion has attached to 
it in France and England. It is true that there are no 
" islands" of orthodox, that is Greek, religion in the midst of 
CathoUcs save one comparatively unimportant district in 
the foothills of the Carpathians, but there are three elements 
of complexity besides this. First, the boundary where the 
()rthodox and the Catholic meet is highly indented and capri- 
cious ; secondly there are in the Middle Danube valley nume- 
rous districts in which both creeds live (with difficulty) side 
by side. Thirdly, the Catholic group is divided into a great 
majority who follow the Latin rite,J and a minority, entirely 
resident upon the east of that group, who, while in communion 
with Rome, follow the Cireek rite as we have seen. The position 
of these last introducesan element of confusion easy to under- 
st.ind, almost equally easy to exaggerate or to under-estimate. 
Uniate Groups 
The Uniate (confined entirely to Galicia, the district of 
Cholm, and the Carpathians) is accustomed in all the externals 
of liis religion to tlic same things as the Greek Church. The 
ritual is much the same ; the language is the same, and it may 
even be said that the popular tradition is the same. On the 
other hand, from influences mainly historical and political 
(not the result of individual conversion), his organised 
liierarchy feels and probably the mass of the laity also feel a 
strong attachment to the Roman communion which separates 
them from the Orthodox Greeks in spite of the similarity of 
worship. It is exceedingly difficult to estimate a moral 
point of this sort. Those with the greatest knowledge of it 
differ widely in their judgment. 
Beyond the main division between Catholic and Orthodox 
coupled with the sub-division of Uniate and Latin right 
within the Catholic group, you have the presence of numerous 
Protestant districts, some of them corresponding to German 
colonisation in the past, some of them representing popula- 
tions who accepted the Reformation upon the .spot. 
Covering a larger area and accounting for more of the popula- 
tion than these isolated Protestant districts, you have mixed 
districts in Hungan,^ where the Cathohc and 'the Protestants 
are combined ; the Catholics usually in a numerical majority, 
but the Protestants often possessing the greater part of the 
land and of local influence. 
Lastly, we must note beyond the Cathohc Lithuanian dis- 
trict of which Kovno is the centre, an isolated Protestant group 
stretching northward to the Gulf of Finland, of which Riga 
is the centre. The district is not homogeneously Protestant, 
but is mainly Protestant or, at any rate, its directing govern- 
ing class is almost entirely Protestant. 
To add to that labyrinth of forces and to the disunion of 
all these eastern marches, there is the fact that these religious 
groups do not exactly, nor in many places even nearly, corre- 
spond with language and national tradition. Thus, the 
Roumanian race (as tested by its language) though in the 
main Orthodox, has its large "Uniate provinces. The Poles, 
much the most clearly defined nationahty of the lot and most 
tenacious of Cathplicism as the national religion, include 
in the district of the Masurian Lakes a population wholly 
PoUsh yet mainly Protestant. Upon the borders of the 
German block Polish Catholicism has often survived, though 
as we have seen, there has been an incursion of German 
language through the influences of Prussian domination. 
Upon the south of these countries which modern Prussia 
j)roposes to dominate in the future and which she is welding 
■into her Central European State, you have Mahommedans 
in Albania and Bosnia, as far north as the very north-western 
corner of the latter district, and of course wherever the Turkish 
language is found in Thrace, southern or eastern Bulgaria, or 
m the Dobrudja. 
Lastly, scattered in groups throughout Poland and the 
Russian or Lithuanian districts immediately to the east of 
Poland throughout Galicia and far into Podolia and Volhynia, 
\'ou have the Jewish communities, mainly German speaking, , 
as we have seen in the matter of language, and exceedingly 
tenacious of their separate religion as welfas of their separate 
race. We must never forget, whether we arc speaking of race, 
of language, or of religion, one-half of the Jewish people live 
ir. these marches of the east beyond the German group and 
are in communion with the great body of Jews inhabiting 
the German Empire itself. 
Such, in general, and only of course in rough outline, is the 
religious complex of the belt lying east of the Germans stretch 
ing from the Baltic Sea to the ^gean, the Adriatic, the 
Balkans, and the Black Sea. 
If I had made an attempt at more precise description, the 
reader would ha\'e found with every additional detail a further 
complexity, for the mark of the" whole is the extreme dis- 
turbance which historical accident has brought here upon 
rehgion as upon race, upon race as upon language. 
The render will note that the language map in its 
