There can be no question with the philosopher, that war is one of the
great sources of change in the movement of the world. Whether its
purpose be conquest or defence, or its stimulant ambition or
restlessness, or its immediate impulse the genius of some great leader,
urging the rapacity of a people, the changes which it makes in the
general mass of society are always more remarkable than those of any
other instrument of human impression. Wars are the moral thunderstorms,
which either cover the face of society with havoc, or purify its
atmosphere. War is the shifting of the channel in which the great stream
of society has hitherto flowed on, and the formation of the new course
which fertilises a new region, while it leaves the old one barren; or,
is like the power of steam, a pressure in its nature explosive, and
marking its power only in its ruin, but capable of being guided into a
general benefactor of man, and originating effects large and general
beyond the means of any other mover.
To the reader of the Scriptures, the question is decided at once. War is
constantly held forth as the instrument of Divine action—sometimes as
punishment, sometimes as restoration, but always as subservient to a
great providential intention. A voice of more than man calls Cyrus from
the sands of Persia, at once to smite the pride of Babylon, and to break
the chains of the Jew. The same voice summons Alexander from the hills
of Macedonia to subvert Persepolis, and be the protector of the chosen
people. We have the distinct declaration from the highest of all
sources, that the Roman war which closed the national existence of that
unhappy but memorable people, was the direct performance of the Divine
will by the instrumentality of the heathen sword.
It is true, that in later history we have not the same power of
ascertaining the distinct purposes of Providence. We “see through a
glass darkly,” through the dimmed medium of human knowledge, through the
comparison of things imperfectly shown, and the misty conjectures of
man. Yet still it is a study honourable to human intelligence, and we
are sometimes enabled, even by flashes and fragments of evidence, to
trace without superstition or exaggeration the ways of that great
Disposer, who balances the fates of nations, and whose vigilance is as
sleepless as His power is immeasurable. No man conversant with modern
history can doubt, that the war of the German princes in the sixteenth
century sheltered the cradle of the Reformation, until the mighty infant
was enabled to quit that cradle and assume maturity; or that the war
with Spain and the destruction of the Armada gave English Protestantism
an embodying of strength in England, and a renown abroad, which secured
it from all assault either at home or abroad; or that the wars of
William III., in Ireland and on the Continent, were the virtual throwing
of a shield over Protestantism in England, and extinguishing by the
sword in France the power which had pledged itself to the extermination
of French Protestantism; or that the French revolutionary war, however
originating in the national vices, had, in its conquest of the three
Capitals of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, a direct connection with the
vengeance of insulted justice, and the retribution of outraged humanity
on the royal spoilers of unhappy Poland.
Nothing among the phases of human affairs has been a matter of older or
more frequent wonder to both the philosopher and the Christian, than the
condition of the country ranging along the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean. That, within the perpetual hearing, and almost within
sight of the civilisation of Europe, with the sounds of its moral
revolutions, progress, and discoveries in its ears, it has never
exhibited an inclination to try the strength of its own frame in any of
the exercises of self-government; that, with a population highly gifted
by nature, acute, adroit, and even warlike, fifty-fold more numerous
than the Turk; that, with the finest climate of the globe, the richest
soil, the noblest historic recollections, the whole region, from Egypt
to the Euphrates, should have exhibited its bravery in nothing but the
exploits of banditti, its intelligence in nothing but the craft of the
trafficker, and its philosophy in nothing but the submission of the
slave, seems unaccountable.
Yet especially that Palestine, the land of which we can never speak the
name, or remember the afflictions, or revolve the history, without
homage, sorrow, and hope; that the soil, with every hill and valley and
sea-shore sacred to the Christian heart, and the object of promises, on
which we fully rely, yet which transcend all that earth has seen of
blessing, power, and splendour,—the land of which Inspiration has
pronounced: “Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon
withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the
days of thy mourning shall be ended. Thy people also shall be all
righteous: they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my
planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified. A little one
shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation: I the Lord
will hasten it in his time” (Isaiah, lx. 20); that Palestine, towards
which every man, Christian or Jew, looks, as the prophet in the days of
the captivity looked in his prayer, should be still desolate; that even
Jerusalem, whose very dust is dear to us, should be known as scarcely
more than the haunt of obscure superstition, and the squabbles of Greek
and Latin monks,—is among the most surprising facts of human annals.
We are by no means sanguine as to the _effect_ of the war, into which
Russia has provoked the Powers of Europe. It is an impulse which may
pass away—a “wind which bloweth where it listeth, and we hear but the
sound thereof”—a form of ambitious frenzy, starting up from the imperial
couch, and, in the first moment of exhaustion, sinking back within its
curtains. But, notwithstanding all those possibilities, to chide the
eagerness of human anticipation, nothing is more evident than that the
war has some features which distinguish it from all the wars since the
fall of the Greek Empire. It is remarkable that its first quarrel was in
Jerusalem, and the express contest was for the possession of the most
venerated spot in Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre. Whether this quarrel
was sincere or a pretence—whether to restore injured rights or to cover
a determination of wrongs—is a matter of no moment in presence of the
fact that thus began the Russian war. Another obvious fact is, that
though there have been expeditions to the Levant within the century, as
the march of Napoleon into Syria, and the later assaults on Acre, this
is the first war, since the Crusades, which ever poured the weight of
the great armies and navies of England and France on the East, which
ever planted a solid step on the lands under the Mahommedan rule, which
ever exhibited European strength, arts, discipline, and treasure, in
their actual and distinct character, to the eye of the Mahommedan. If
the European forces should be withdrawn to-morrow, there can be no doubt
of their having thrown a new light on the mind of the Mahommedan world.
The old generation must soon pass away, and a large portion of its
prejudices must pass away with it. The new generation may respect its
memory, and act as the pallbearers in its obsequies, but they will not
go down into its grave. Already the Turk is becoming associated with the
Englishman and the Frenchman; the English discipline of the Contingent
must leave its impressions, even when the Contingent shall be broken up.
The pay, the punctuality, the good order, and the gallantry of the
service, cannot be forgotten; and the man will be cast into a mould,
manlier and more capable of progress than any Turk, since the tribe,
with the “black banner” before them, descended from the slopes of the
Himalaya. The Christians of the Ottoman Empire have obtained new
privileges already by this war. Measures are on foot for making their
testimony available in the courts of justice. They are to have the right
of bearing arms in the Ottoman service—a highly important innovation,
and leading to every privilege; and there can be no doubt that the
Ottoman government must acknowledge its old power of oppression to be at
an end, or that any attempt at persecution or violence to its Christian
subjects would be under penalty of provoking resistance from its
Christian allies. All those results have their origin in the war, and
those are in their nature progressive. Privilege begets privilege, and
the next quarter of a century, whether in the struggles of war or the
activity of peace, will place the Christians of the East in a position
higher than their most sanguine speculation could have contemplated
before the war on the Euxine.
Views of this order give additional value to that interesting subject,
the character of the Christian Church in the East. It becomes important
to know how far that Church is capable of assisting the progress, aiding
the energies, or even conforming to the character of a people on the eve
of renovation; whether it is to continue the swamp that it has been for
the four centuries since the capture of Constantinople, or to be the
fount flowing with the waters of national life; whether it is to be
regarded as a monument of dreary ceremonial, encumbering the soil with
its weight, and of doctrines incompatible with the gospel, or as only
waiting to be freed from the barbarian accumulations of antiquity, to
show the world an architecture worthy of its apostolic founders, and fit
for the reception of enlightened mankind.
The Greek Church has, beyond all question, high claims to the
consideration of Christendom as the mother of all the churches,—founded
by the Apostles, governed by the last of the Apostles,—the Church of the
first Christian empire, and for the first four centuries exhibiting the
most illustrious examples of virtue and ability, of patience under
trial, and of piety in the propagation of the faith. In the Church of
proconsular Asia was the arena in which the strength of revelation was
first tried against all the power of imperial heathenism, the severer
combats than against the lions of Numidia. To that province was sent the
message to the “Angels of the Seven Churches;” in its neighbouring
Byzantium was erected the central Church, the spiritual sun, which
spread its light through the East and West, through the shores and
forests of the North, and through the mountains and wildernesses of the
South,—the Church which, resisting the image-worship of the Western
nations, and the mysterious mythology of the East, continued for fifteen
hundred years the Ark of Christianity.
The subject has been frequently touched on in the rapid publications of
our time, but with an inaccuracy of detail, and an obscurity of view,
which fully justifies the attempt to rectify the one, and to clear up
the other.
From the fourth century, the subtle spirit of the Greeks began to
exercise itself in those questions of Scripture, which, being
confessedly above the range of the human faculties, are to be received
on the authority of Scripture alone, as the objects of faith, and not of
experience. The Arian, Nestorian, and Eutychian heresies began to
disturb the world. The great Council of Nice (A.D. 325), an assemblage
of 318 bishops, declared the voice of the Church against the doctrine of
Arius; yet the heresy continued for some ages to distract the empire.
When these disputes had worn themselves out, another source of
disturbance exhibited itself in the Civil claims of the rival Sees of
Rome and Constantinople. The Bishop of Rome demanded the Supremacy for
the sitter in the ancient capital of empire; the Bishop of
Constantinople demanded it for the sitter in the capital of the actual
empire. But the contest was unequal. The Bishop of the West had no
imperial figure to thwart his authority; the Bishop of the East stood
directly under the shadow of the imperial figure. The former was the
lord of the faith to the half-civilised and superstitious millions of
the barbarian settlers in Europe; the latter was surrounded with as many
heresies as episcopates, with keen inquiries and doubtful fidelity, with
philosophy envenomed into scepticism, and with four Patriarchs,
sometimes denying his doctrine, and always envying his authority.
The contest continued through two centuries, treated by the warlike
emperors with contempt, and regarded by the feeble emperors with alarm.
At length it was decided by Justinian, one of those characters who form
epochs in history. It is only by such epochs that we can mark the
progress of those unvarying years and casual trains of events which form
the stream of Time. Remote history is like the remote landscape; we
judge of the country only by its mountain-tops. History has done but
narrow justice to this restorer of the Roman empire. It has measured his
imperial strength on the scale of his personal weakness; but the true
estimate of the governor of kingdoms is by what he has done on the
throne. Monarchs are _actors_, with their kingdom for a stage, and the
world for their audience. When they throw off the royal robe and the
buskin, they are but men; but who has a right to follow them behind the
scenes? In the reign of Justinian was reunited the dislocated empire.
Italy and Northern Africa were conjoined. The barbarian kingdoms of
Europe were reduced into submission, the celebrated Code was established
which formed the body of law to Europe for nearly ten centuries, and
which exists as the civil law to this day. The noblest temple of Europe
(until the sixteenth century), the Santa Sophia, was built by him, and
he held the sceptre with undiminished authority to the end of a reign of
thirty-nine years, and a life of eighty-three!
The sole imperial weakness of Justinian was his theology; he loved to
mingle in the turbid discussions of the time. In one of those
discussions, to conciliate the verdict of the Roman bishop, he conferred
on him the title of “Head of the Universal Church,”—a title which no man
could be guiltless in either bestowing or accepting, the title belonging
to Him alone who earned it on Calvary; the bestowal was a usurpation,
and the adoption a crime. From this transaction, and from the year 533,
the Papacy dates its assumed supremacy over the Universal Church.
The separation of the Greek and the Latin Churches was near at hand. In
the seventh century Rome had adopted image-worship. In the eighth
century the Emperor Leo proclaimed it an abomination, and ordered that
all images should be taken from the altars. The Pope (Gregory II.)
answered the command by a challenge. His answer was an Anathema. “You
accuse,” said his letter, “the Catholics of idolatry: in this you betray
your own impiety. You assault us, tyrant, with a carnal and military
hand; we can only implore Christ that he will _send you a devil_ for the
destruction of your body and the salvation of your soul. Are you
ignorant that the Popes are the bands of union, the mediators of peace
between the East and the West? The eyes of the nations are fixed on our
humility, and they _revere as a God on earth_ the Apostle St Peter,
whose image you threaten to destroy. The remote kingdoms of the earth
present their homage to Christ _and His viceregent_.” A war followed;
Gregory sent out his “pastoral letters” through the West. The imperial
troops were beaten in Italy by the peasant insurrection. A battle was
fought on the banks of the Po, with such slaughter of the Greeks, that
for a succession of years the people refused to eat of the fish. Rome
was broken off from the empire. The imperial sovereignty of the West was
at an end, after a dominion of seven centuries; and image-worship was
established as the religion of the Popedom.
The schism of the churches was now begun. But the question had changed
from doctrine, which the growing ignorance of the age was unable to
discuss, to jurisdiction, a discussion which at once excited the
ambition and fed the animosity of a time of _darkness_. The bitterness
of the contest was increased in the ninth century by the elevation of
Photius to the see of Constantinople.
This remarkable man was the solitary light of his age in the East. He
was a layman, who had passed through the highest offices of the State,
and a scholar who has left the monument of his scholarship to posterity
in his celebrated _Bibliotheca_. To place him in the bishopric, the
emperor deposed its former possessor, who appealed to Rome. The pope
ordered his restoration; the emperor repeated his refusal.
It would be as idle to trace, as it would be difficult to disentangle,
the perplexities of a quarrel which continued for centuries. But the
consummation was now at hand. The Pope (Leo IX.), and the Patriarch,
Cerularius, had excommunicated each other. A conference of pretended
conciliation was held in Constantinople with the papal legates. It ended
in new claims, met by new resistance: the legates, at last, went
solemnly to the church of Santa Sophia, publicly read the letters of
excommunication, placed the document of anathema on the high altar, and
then departed from Constantinople! Thus in 1054 was completed the
Schism, which had been commenced in arrogant ambition, and continued in
priestly rancour; which had scandalised Christendom, and libelled
Christianity; and which, in Asia, was punished by the conquests and
conversions of Mahommedanism, and in Europe by the increased power, the
darker superstition, and the sterner severities of Rome.
From this period we may state the doctrines and practices of the Greek
Church, as an independent community.
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is established. But the Holy Spirit is
assumed to _proceed_ from the Father only; in this point differing from
the Popish and the Protestant Churches. This difference was the subject
of long controversy between the East and the West, but, with the usual
fate of ancient disputation, leaving both parties more confident in
their own opinions.
On the doctrine of Redemption, its language is that of Scripture; Christ
is acknowledged to be the Regenerator of our fallen nature.
Justification by Faith includes the works which prove the sincerity of
the faith, without which “faith is dead.”
Regeneration is regarded as _essential_, but this Church admits of no
_Indulgences_; on this point differing totally from the practices of
Rome.
The Church acknowledges no _purgatory_. But it holds an “intermediate
state of the departed;” the spirits of the wicked remaining in a place
of sorrow and comparative suffering, and those of the virtuous in a
place of rest and comparative happiness; and both thus remaining until
the Resurrection. But it admits “prayer for the dead;” not for the
redemption of the spirit from a place of _purification_ or partial
penalty, but from a consideration of the Divine mercy. In those
doctrines it makes some approach to Protestantism, though in praying for
the dead it obviously goes beyond the only authority to which we can
look for the condition of man after death—namely, Scripture.
In its ritual, the Church more nearly approaches Rome. It acknowledges
as Sacraments, Marriage, Confirmation, Extreme Unction, Ordination, and
Penance, in addition to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Baptism is administered by trine immersion.
Infants are baptised on the eighth day.
Chrism, or anointing with holy oil, which is regarded as confirmation,
is administered soon after baptism.
The Lord’s Supper is administered under both forms, the bread and the
wine, to both priest and laity. But the Church holds transubstantiation,
or, in the words of the Confession, “when the priest consecrates the
elements, the very substance of the bread and wine is transformed into
the substance of the true body and blood of Christ.”
The ceremonial of the consecration is worth remarking, as it seems to
have been taken in some degree as the model for the modern innovations
in the English Ritual. The elements are first carried round the church
_on the head of the deacon_; then the priest prays that the Almighty may
convert them into the substance of the body and blood. He then prays to
the Holy Spirit for His gift. He then prays to Jesus Christ, as sitting
on the right hand of the Father, and yet invisibly present, to impart to
the receivers “His immaculate body and precious blood.” Still, there are
some distinctions in the Eastern and Western practice. The _same_ degree
of worship is not offered to the Host as in the Romish Church. It is not
carried in procession, nor is it offered to public adoration, nor is
there any festival in its honour. It is carried to the sick, but the
priests do not prostrate themselves before it. All this ceremonial the
Eastern Church pretends to justify on the ground of antiquity, where it
was not to be found in the purest and most primitive centuries. The
Protestant looks to the original solemnisation, and takes his practice
from Scripture. What common sense can believe that Jesus of Nazareth
gave His actual body to be eaten before His eyes, or that the Apostles,
while at supper, believed that they were eating flesh and drinking
blood, and this without a sign of repulsion and reluctance, or without
even a remonstrance or an inquiry? The words, “This do in _remembrance_
of me,” are a sufficient declaration that neither His flesh nor His
blood was to remain on _earth_; for remembrance implied departure. And
that the _remembrance_ was the express purpose, is distinctly declared
in the words, “As oft as ye eat this _bread_ and drink this _cup_, ye do
show the Lord’s death _till He come_;”—thus extinguishing at once
transubstantiation, and the more diluted doctrine of the “Real
presence.” St Paul (A.D. 59) describes the Sacrament as still the
_bread_ and the _cup_ (1st Corinthians, xi. 26), the popular dishonour
of which would involve dishonour to the body and blood of which they
were the _representatives_. And he further states, that when the “Real
presence” shall have come, the representation shall pass away; as in the
instance of the Jewish sacrifices, which represented the offering of
Christ, but when the _real offering_ was come, the representation
naturally passed away, the Temple was overthrown, and sacrifice was no
more. And this was the language of the great Apostle of the Gentiles
upwards of a quarter of a century _after_ the Crucifixion. If St Paul
believed in Transubstantiation, it is impossible to doubt that he would
have scrupulously avoided any mention of the “bread and the cup,”
particularly on an occasion when he was warning the dissolute and
disputatious Corinthians of the danger of _disrespect_ to the Sacrament.
The Greek Church holds the doctrine of Penance, Absolution by the
priest, and Auricular Confession, as a consequence of the doctrine of
Absolution, “the priest not knowing _what_ to absolve until he knows the
state of the penitent.” Absolution and Confession are held to be of the
highest importance, and of the most general application. They have been
termed “the axle on which the globe of ecclesiastical polity turns;” and
beyond question they have been the most extensive sources of power and
revenue to both the Greek faith and the Roman.