ao PRELIMINARY TO INTERCOMMUNION

or the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin

to be innovations upon the Faith, and only secondly
and not always because they find them inconsistent
with it, that they have protested against them.
It was for that Faith that they went into schism with
the West in the Eleventh Century. It was because they
were unable without an essential sacrifice of conscience
to compromise their loyalty to that Faith as they knew
it that they brought upon themselves the cruelty of the

Fourth Crusade, that in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth

Centuries, both at Lyons and at Florence, they refused
to say the word of apostasy which would have been
rewarded by that help from the West for which they
were perishing, and that at long last, having passed under
the heel of the Turk, they have had the courage to be
true to it and to themselves in an indescribable and
sealed underworld of helotage for over four and a half
centuries.
there has been anything fundamental to a nation,
If
a culture or a theology and we have had ample
experience in England that except in books the three
categories cannot be separated it is fundamental to
the Greek that the Faith of the Eastern-Orthodox
Churches is neither more nor less than the Faith of the
Undivided Church of the (Ecumenical Councils and
that the Faith of that Church was in every essential
the unchanged Faith of the Church of the Apostles.
Wehave here not a fundamental of abstract con-
troversy but a fundamental with which the Greeks
have been ingrained by a secular process.
To shift their ground from it would be to rewrite
their history and to reshape their characteristics as a
nation no less
completely than an absolute repudiation
of all need for a Reformation in the Sixteenth Century
would compel us to rewrite and to reshape our own.
It would constrain them to justify, if not the policy,
at least the motive with which, as Professor Diehl put*
 FAITH OF THE UNDIVIDED CHURCH 21

it,from the Twelfth Century onwards the Papacy held

"
it
pour but constant de sa politique de refaire, de gre ou
de force, Punion des eglises" 1 and in pursuit of which
they are passionately convinced that, having robbed
them of their freedom, having watched them with
sardonic satisfaction in the long-drawn agony of their
2
oppression by Islam, and having waited with eager-
ness for their extinction, in pursuit of its inexorable
determination to subdue or to destroy them, it has
intrigued in recent days to prevent their recovery of
their mother city and their national shrine, and has
secured Mustapha Kemal liberty to Turkify Asia Minor
by wiping it clean alike of
its Christian
population and
of its Christian monuments. 3
As to whether they are right or wrong in their
arraignment of the Papacy is here immaterial. The
4
point to bear in mind is that the nation as a whole holds
that its sufferings were the punishment of its fidelity
to the Faith of the Undivided Church of the (Ecu-
menical Councils, and treasures that Faith as the very
Ark of its Covenant.
Mutatis mutandis, it is the same with the Russian,
Serb, Ruman and other nations which with the Greeks
make up the free sodality of the Eastern-Orthodox
World.
In the history of each, whether its record be a record
of slavery and disaster or a record of freedom and
prosperity, devotion to the Faith of the Church of the
(Ecumenical Councils has been above everything its

1
Byzance, C. Diehl, 1919 (Flammarion, Parii), p. 248.
*
See the writer's Redemption of St. Sopbia, 4th edition (Faith Press), chap. V.
*On August 1 5th, 1920, the Kemalists wrecked the lixth-century Church of the
Koimeiis at Nicxa, the only historic and symbolic Greek Church which had never been
converted into a mosque, and massacred the whole Christian population of that and
other places. It is stated that the Greek army a few miles away at Brusa had been
forbidden to advance. The Greeks of Constantinople, let us hope wrongly, believe
the embargo to have been given by the Italian Government at the instance of the Vatican.
See Christian East, December, 1920.
*
Something like 95 per cent, of the Greeks belong to the Eutem-Orthodox Chureha*.
22 PRELIMINARY TO INTERCOMMUNION

controlling inspiration and the most cherished of its

glories.
Moreover, in spite of the recent artificial creation of
state which are still unreal, it remains
nationalities
true that Religion and Nationality, as has been often
observed, are still interchangeable terms in the Balkans
and the Levant. That is because under the conditions
of life which prevailed and still prevail, men of the
same religion have been differentiated from their
neighbours for centuries by their customs, laws, educa-
tion, outlook, experience, and so forth, i.e., in just those
life of which their common traditional
aspects of civilized
and conventional Religion is the formative principle.
English Religion is complex. Liberalism in its search
for Truth 1 has accustomed it to a variety of systems.
The most thorough among us can only
medisevalist
claim that his own fundamental for himself, and
is

must admit that English culture is able to adapt itself

to any earthquake of science or of thought.
It is different with the mass of the Eastern-Orthodox.
Their culture is founded on their cosmology, and their
cosmology is held by them to be derived from the Faith
of the Undivided Church of the (Ecumenical Councils.
We are often reminded, though, perhaps, with some
exaggeration, of the chasm which separates the intelli-
gentsia in Eastern-Orthodox countries from the bulk
of their fellow countrymen. Most of us consider that
to be a phenomenon of evil portent. But at any rate
it is there. They are sharply divided from their co-
nationals. Among the great bulk of the Eastern-
Orthodox the abandonment of the ancient fundamentals
of Orthodoxy, not by evolution or explosion from
within, but on the suggestion of outsiders, would pro-
duce for all except the intelligentsia bewilderment and
chaos and unreality of sanctions in every category of

1
Sw, for ctmpk, Dr. Sandiy'i Nunc Dimittit (Faith Pnw, 1910), p. u *Mf.