It is not, however, only the Turkish community that presents a religious colour. The same is true of the other communities of the country. With them, also, the nation has come to be the Church. This is due, in part, to circumstances anterior to the Turkish Conquest. The theological disputes between Christians in the earlier centuries of the history of the Church, even if purely religious and philosophical at first, erelong assumed a national character, and became respectively the banners around which racial distinctions and political antagonisms rallied, and acquired a consistence which endures to this day. How deeply ingrained in the Christian population of the country, to-day, is the spirit to see things under a religious colour appears, sometimes, in small but significant ways. A poor Greek woman, anxious to find a husband for her daughter, who was neither young nor beautiful, was informed that a worthy boatman was prepared to marry the girl. He had everything to recommend him, but he was an Armenian. “What!” exclaimed the mother, turning indignantly to the friend who recommended the man; “What! do you wish me to give my daughter to an Arian? No; let her rather die.” Evidently the woman was not an expert in the use of theological terms, for the Armenians are not Arians. But her reply shows that old theological disputes, which one might suppose had been forgotten, have left their impress upon the popular mind, and are associated with national distinctions. The division between Eastern and Western Christendom is not merely a religious schism. The organisations known as the Coptic Church, the Nestorian Church, the Armenian Church, are not simply different ecclesiastical denominations, or various schools of thought. They are as much, if not more, the assertion of national peculiarities. They have maintained, so far as the times allowed, a people’s independence; preserved the ties which bound a people to its past; and continued the use of its ancestral speech at home, in the affairs of social life, and in the worship of God. With the Turkish Conquest, this fusion of national and religious sentiments became, if possible, more complete. The new rule, involving the loss of political freedom, and the ascendency of an alien faith, made the Church dearer, and left her to be the only sphere of anything approaching national life and independence. The distinction between Church and Nationality consequently passed out of sight. And nowhere is the idea that to change one’s religious profession is to be false to one’s people, and that to be a faithful churchman is to be a patriot, more strongly entrenched than among the adherents of the Christian communities in Turkey. On the other hand, the new rulers could not hope, and did not desire, to assimilate the Christian populations of the country, or to incorporate them in one political body. What with the differences of race, creed, language, civilisation, a gulf was fixed between the conquerors and the conquered. The two parties could be nothing else but distinct and alien communities. Under these circumstances, policy and necessity led the conquerors to maintain the different organisations in which they found the subjugated peoples already arranged. To divide and conquer may not be the highest statesmanship, but it was a principle that, in the condition of the country, could be quickly applied. For one thing, by that process the power of the conquered to rise would be crushed. Furthermore, to leave the different churches of the land to their own ways was, after all, the only solution of the problem how to govern people who, because of their religious beliefs, and their social institutions, could not be brought under the operation of the Sacred Code of Islam. It would, so far, please the conquered. It would accord with that regard for use and wont, for what he calls Adet, which the Turk cherishes. It was practical, and in harmony with the theocratic conception of society familiar to the Moslem mind. Hence the Turkish Government has been accustomed to classify the various peoples of the Empire according to their respective creeds, and has granted them a considerable measure of self-government, in such matters as marriage, inheritance, education, the management of charitable institutions, and jurisdiction over the clergy. As these bodies were ecclesiastical corporations, their ecclesiastical chiefs became at once their rulers, both in religious and in civil affairs, and their representatives in all transactions with the Ottoman authorities. In fact, these communities have enjoyed privileges that give them, in some respects, a status similar to that conferred upon foreigners by the Capitulations. On the principle of religious classification, Greeks, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Servians, were considered members of the same civil community, because members of the same Church. And, on the same principle, if an Armenian left his National Church to join the Roman Catholic or the Protestant communion, he passed beyond the authority of his former ecclesiastical superiors not only in matters spiritual but also in matters secular, acquiring with his new beliefs a new legal standing, as a “Latin” or an “Evangelical.” In this new character, he came under the protection of another chief, was placed under new regulations, and made amenable to a different court. It is because of this intimate union of the religious and the civil, that converts from the National Churches in the Empire have been compelled to form themselves into distinct civil communities, and to incur the odium of, apparently, deserting their own people. But only thus could they escape the pains which their original ecclesiastical authorities had the power to inflict upon dissident subjects; only thus could the Turkish Government grant the converts a legal independent status in religious life.
This method of dealing with the Christian subjects of the Empire worked, on the whole, smoothly, until the idea of nationality, which has been such a powerful factor in the recent history of Europe, spread also among the various peoples of Turkey, inspiring them to assert their distinctness from one another, and to seek liberation from the rule of the dominant race. Then great searching of hearts arose. For the new idea was subversive of a system based upon the principle that the fundamental bond of unity between men is community of faith. Hence, when the Bulgarians demanded to be organised into a community distinct from the Greek community, though one in doctrine with it, and to have bishops and an ecclesiastical head of their own nationality, the request proved a source of considerable difficulty. The chiefs of the Greek Church, under whose authority the Bulgarians had been placed since 1767, as fellow-believers, naturally opposed the demand, taking ground upon the principle that, “In Jesus Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free”; a principle which Moslems could appreciate. Turkish statesmen opposed the demand as unconstitutional, and contrary to custom; at the same time, suspecting it to be a step towards ultimate political independence.
TOMB IN SCUTARI
Under these circumstances various expedients were suggested, whereby the desired result might be secured in harmony with the law of the land. By some of their friends, the Bulgarians were advised to separate from the Greek Church on some unimportant point of doctrine or ritual, and so acquire the right before Turkish law to form a distinct community. Another proposal was to declare themselves Protestants, and thus not only escape from the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople, but gain the support of Protestant nations. Yet another plan was to join the Roman Catholic Church, with the advantage of receiving the protection of France. The movement in favour of the last course went so far that a Bulgarian priest was consecrated a Roman Catholic bishop; but the scheme was abruptly terminated by the spiriting away of that personage to Odessa, with all the paraphernalia of his office. Eventually, under Russian pressure, the demand was granted, and the Bulgarians became a distinct civil and religious community on the ground of difference of nationality. They were, however, a religious corporation before the eye of the law, and in view of the large Bulgarian population still under Turkish rule, especially in Macedonia, the Exarch of the Bulgarian Church must reside in Constantinople to have his authority over that class of the community recognised by the Turkish Government. As though to add more religious colour to the arrangement, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in 1872, laid the Bulgarian Church under the sentence of excommunication as schismatic.
The form in which the Bulgarian question was settled has furnished a precedent which other nationalities, in furtherance of their political aims, have not been slow to appeal to, and which the Turkish Government, with the object of weakening their Christian subjects by sub-divisions, has been, of late, disposed to follow. In the province of Macedonia the system is carried out to perfection. There Bulgarians, Greeks, Servians, and Kutzo-Wlachs, all adherents of the Greek Orthodox Church, have had the fires of their national rivalries fanned into fiercer flame by being organised into different religious communities, under different ecclesiastical superiors, with the result that a situation exists in that province than which nothing more complicated can be imagined.
Before leaving the subject, it is only just to remark that, perhaps, the world has not sufficiently admired the tenacity with which the various Christian peoples of the Near East have adhered to their faith and nationality, in the face of hardships and temptations to which some of their members succumbed. If their life has been stagnant, it is not altogether their fault. Their circumstances have been exceedingly adverse to growth. But they have kept the treasure, although the vessel which has contained it may be earthen. However much the identification, or confusion, of political and religious issues has wrought mischief among these peoples, however much it has quenched their spirit of brotherly love, it is to their churches that they are mainly indebted for the preservation of their national consciousness and aspirations. Amid the darkness, the churches kept the lamp of hope ever burning. They consecrated patriotism by associating it with loyalty to God. They made faith firmer by uniting it with the love of fatherland. And their peoples have lived to see the light of a new day. There is something pathetic in the fact that all this was rendered possible by the degree of self-government in civil and religious matters granted them by their conqueror. There is something tragic in seeing the policy which a conqueror adopted as the only method to establish his rule—nurse the life of his foes, and forge the instruments of his ruin. But men are not always masters of their fate.