Benefits conferred by Church.
Yet amid all the meanness and debasement of the Christian Churches it should ever be remembered that they rendered to their people two inestimable services. They helped to preserve family life and to keep the great mass of their members from abandonment of the Christian profession. However abject the Church, however subservient at times its leaders became to the Ottoman rulers, and however we of the twentieth century may despise priestly pretensions and the claims of any body of men to have a supernatural commission, it is a duty to recognise that the service rendered by the Churches to the Christian subjects of the sultan, and indeed to humanity, in preserving the habits of family life was immeasurably great. One may fully admit that the priests were ignorant, and that the Church became more than ever saturated with pagan superstition; but it safeguarded the idea of Christian marriage based upon the union of the husband for life with one wife. Children were reared in the companionship of a father and mother to each of whom chastity and the necessity of forsaking all others was not merely a tradition and an ideal, but a duty enjoined by the universal teaching of the Church. The results of the education of children amid such teaching, tradition, and environment can only be appreciated when they are compared with those which are produced among their Moslem neighbours, where, under a system fatal to family life, the mother holds a position immeasurably inferior to that of the father.
The Church also helped to prevent the Christian population from abandoning their religious belief, and, to the philosophical student of religions hardly less than to Christians, this result should be regarded as pure gain. The Christians were permitted to have their own religious services, and the attempt was seldom made forcibly to convert them to Mahometanism. The teaching of Mahomet that the ‘People of the Books’ were not to be molested so long as they submitted and paid tribute, usually secured a contemptuous toleration of their worship. There was little formal interference with their religious practices. Their processions, rites, and ceremonies only encountered opposition from the fanatical brutality of individuals, though Christian worshippers were constantly exposed to petty persecutions from persons in authority who expressed their dislike and loathing of Christianity in a thousand different Inducements to renounce Christianity. ways. But it must always be remembered to the credit of the Christians that abandonment of their faith would at any time have saved them from all persecution and have placed them on an equality with their conquerors. The singularly democratic creed and practice of Islam at once open every preferment to the convert. The negro, the Central Asiatic, no less than the Christian rayah, once he has pronounced the Esh-had, is on an equality in theory and in practice with the descendant of the Prophet. Turkish history abounds with instances of renegades or their sons rising to the highest positions in the state. A Christian who accepted Islam had every career open to him. The Christian subjects of the empire have always been aware of their own superiority in intellectual capacity to their Turkish neighbours. This superiority is manifest in every country where Moslems and Christians live side by side. It is mainly due to the inferior position assigned in practice in every Mahometan country to woman, a position illustrated by the custom of repudiation—which the husband may exercise in lieu of divorce—by the lack of family life in which children are nurtured in the companionship of both parents, and even by the absence of a family name.[564]
It would indeed have been remarkable if with the unspeakable advantages of family life on their side the Christians had not been superior in capacity to their neighbours. But, in spite of their lively consciousness of such superiority and of the advantages to be gained by perversion, few Christians became renegades.
Degradation of people.
But, notwithstanding the fact that their refusal to abandon a higher for a lower form of religion must be accounted to them for righteousness, the Christians passed into a Slough of Despond. Disarmed and oppressed, they became demoralised and lost self-respect. Their progress and development, material, intellectual, and moral, was arrested. They fell back upon deceit and cunning and the other vices with which a subjugated people seeks to defend itself against its oppressors and which are the usual characteristics of a people held in bondage. The most disastrous result of the conquest upon the people was to create a low standard of morality, and, as in the course of time habits form character, this result endured and continues to the present day. Dishonesty, unfair dealing, bribery, and untruthfulness came to be regarded among all the Christian races of the Ottoman Empire as venial offences or as pardonable blunders. This deterioration of character was not, and is not, confined to laymen. The environment of all classes has been powerful for evil, and the standards in particular of commercial honesty generally prevalent in Christian nations have neither been preserved nor attained.
Under Turkish rule punishment often failed to follow detection. In some cases—notably, for example, bigamy—the conquering race recognises no offence and therefore awards no punishment. The Christians had and have so little confidence in their chance of obtaining justice that it is the exception to prosecute an offender. A man will rather suffer loss than waste his time in appealing to a court where he knows that he will certainly incur expense and inconvenience and that the offender, provided he can pay, can escape condemnation. It is to this impossibility of obtaining justice that must be ascribed more perhaps than to any other cause the lowering of the morals of Eastern Christians. Those who know them best, from Arab Christians in Syria to the Greeks and others in Constantinople and the Balkan Peninsula, and whose sympathies are entirely with them in the persecution they have undergone, and in their desire to shake off the oppressor’s yoke, have regretfully to confess that the reputation which they have acquired in Western Europe for untrustworthiness and untruthfulness is not undeserved. Happily, in Greece and other countries which have been freed from Turkish misrule there are abundant signs of an awakening to the necessity of regarding offences from a loftier standpoint and of presenting in the Churches a higher ideal of morality; signs, too, of the public opinion which is bringing these countries into line with Western states.[565]
Effect of conquest on Turks.