From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain record of a Pleasant Journey

by Julia Ward Howe

Greece is a poor democracy; America, a rich one. The second commands all the luxuries and commodities of life; the first, little more than its necessaries. Yet we, coming from our own state of things, can understand how the Greek values himself upon being a man, and upon having a part in the efficient action of the commonwealth. Greece is reproached with giving too ambitious an education to her sons and daughters. Her institutions form teachers, not maids and valets, mistresses and masters, not servants. But for this America will not reproach her—America, whose shop-girls take music lessons, whose poorest menials attend lectures, concerts, and balls. A democratic people does not acquiesce either in priestly or in diplomatic precedence. Let people perform their uses, earn their bread, enjoy their own, and respect their neighbors; these are the maxims of good life in a democratic country. "Love God, love thy neighbor," is better than "fear God, honor the king." As to the sycophancy of snobs, the corruption of office, the contingent insufficiency alike of electors and elected,—these are the accidents of all human governments, to be arrested only by the constant watchfulness of the wiser spirits, the true pilots of the state.

By the time that I had excogitated all this, my feet had visited many square yards of palace, comprising bed-room, banqueting-room, chief lady's room, chapel, and so on. I had seen the queen's garden, and the palmas qui meruit ferat, and which she has left for her successor. I had seen, too, the fine view from the upper windows, sweeping from the Acropolis to the sea. I had exchanged various remarks with my Athenian companion. New furniture was expected with the Russian princess, but scarcely new enthusiasm. The little king had stopped the movement in Thessaly, which would have diverted the Turkish force now concentrated upon Crete, giving that laboring island a chance of rising above the bloody waters that drown her. Little love did the little king earn by this course. One might say that he is on probation, and will, in the end, get his deserts, and no more. And here my friend has slipped some suitable coin into the hand of the smiling major-domo, who showed us over the royal house. Farewell, palace: the day of kings is over. Peoples have now their turn, and God wills it.

THE CATHEDRAL.

In close juxtaposition with the state is the church. In America we have religious liberty. This does not mean that a man has morally the right to have no religion, but that the very nature of religion requires that he should hold his own convictions above the ordinances of others. The Greeks have religious liberty, whose idea is rather this, that people may believe much as they please, provided they adhere outwardly to the national church. The reason assigned for this is, that any change in the form or discipline of this church would weaken the bond that unites the Greeks out of Greece proper with those within her limits. This outward compression and inward latitude is always a dangerous symptom. It points to practical irreligion, an ever widening distance between a man's inward convictions and his outward practice. Passing this by, however, let us have a few words on the familiar aspect and practical working of the Greek church as at present administered. Like other bodies politic and individual already known to us, it consists of a reconciled opposition, which, held within bounds, secures its efficiency. The same, passing those bounds, would cause its annihilation. Like other churches, it is at once aristocratic and democratic. It binds and looses. It is less intellectual than either Catholicism or Protestantism; perhaps less intolerant than either, so far as dogma goes. I still think it narrower than either in the scope of its sympathies, lower than either in its social and individual standard. Taken with the others, it makes up the desired three of human conditions; but before it can meet them harmoniously, it has a long way to go.

Refusing images, but clinging to pictures; allowing the Scriptures to the common people, but discouraging their use of the same; with an unmarried hierarchy of some education, and a married secular clergy of none,—the Greek church seems to me to be too flatly in contradiction with itself and with the spirit of the age to maintain long a social supremacy, a moral efficiency. The department of the clergy last mentioned receive no other support than that of the contingent contributions of the people, paid in small sums, as the wages of services better withheld than rendered. Exorcisms, benedictions, prayers recited over graves, or secured as a cure for sick cattle,—these are some of the sacerdotal acts by which the lesser clergy live. Those who wish to keep these resources open must, of course, discourage the reading of the New Testament, whose great aim and tendency are to substitute a religion of life and doctrine for a religion of observances. Congregations reading this book for themselves, no matter how poor or ignorant in other matters, will ask something other of the priest than the exorcism of demons or the cure of cattle.

Of the higher clergy, some have studied in Germany, and, reversing Mr. Emerson's sentence, must know, one thinks, better than they build. Orthodox their will may be, firm their adherence to the establishment, strict their administration of it. But they must be aware of the limits that it sets to religious progress. And so long as they cannot preach to their congregations the full sincerity and power of their inward convictions, their ministration loses in moral power,—the house is divided against itself.

I visited the Cathedral of Athens but once. It is a spacious and handsome church, in what I should call a modern Eastern style. It was on Sunday, and mass was going on. The middle and right aisles were filled with men, the left aisle with women. I do not know whether I have mentioned elsewhere that in the Greek and Russian, as in the Quaker church, men and women stand separately—stand, for seats are neither provided nor allowed. I found a place among the women, commanding a view of the high altar. The archbishop, a venerable-looking man, in gold brocade and golden head-dress, went through various functions, which, though not identical with those of the Romish mass, seemed to amount to about the same thing. There were bowings, appearings and retirings, the swinging of censers, and the presentation of tapers fixed in silver candelabras, and tied in the middle with black ribbon, so as to form a sheaf. These candelabras the archbishop from time to time took, one under each arm, and made a step or two towards the congregation. The dresses of the assistant priests were very rich, and their heads altogether Oriental in aspect. One of them, with his gold-bronzed face and golden hair, looked like pictures of St. John. The vocal part of the performance consisted of a sort of chant, with responses intensely nasal and unmusical. This psalmody, which is little relished by Greeks of culture, is yet maintained, like the discipline, intact, lest the most trifling amelioration should weaken the tie of Christian brotherhood between the free Greek church and the church that is in bondage with her children. To one familiar with the pretexts of conservatism, this plea of union before improvement is not new nor availing. One laughs, and remembers the respectabilities who tried to paralyze the American intellect and conscience in order to save the Union, which, after all, was saved only by the measures they abhorred and denounced. I had soon enough of what I was able to hear and see of the Greek mass. As I stole softly away, I passed a sort of lesser altar, before which was burning a circular row of tapers. An old woman had similar tapers on a small table, for sale, I suppose. I was invited, by gesture, to consummate a pious act by the purchase of some of these, but declined, not without remembering that I was some time since elected a lay delegate from a certain Unitarian church to a certain Unitarian conference. This fact, if communicated, would not have heightened my standing in the approbation of the sisters who then surrounded me. "What, no candle?" said their indignant glances. I was silent, and fled.

THE MISSIONARIES.

In the presence of the contradictions alluded to above, the position of the Greek church and of American Protestant missionaries becomes one of mutual delicacy and difficulty. The church allows religious liberty, and assumes religious tolerance. Yet it naturally holds fast its own children within its own borders. The Protestants are pledged to labor for the world's Christianization. When they see its progress opposed by antiquated usage and insufficient method, they cannot acquiesce in these obstacles, nor teach others to revere them. Here we must say at once that no act is so irreligious as the resistance of progress. Thought and conscience are progressive. Christ's progressive labor carried further the Jewish faith and tenets which were religious before he came, but which became irreligious in resisting the further and finer conclusions to which he led. "I come not to destroy, but to fulfil." Progress does fulfil in the spirit, even though it destroy in the letter. Protestantism acknowledges this, and this acknowledgment constitutes its superiority over the Greek and Catholic churches. The sincere reader of the New Testament will be ever more and more disposed to make his religion a matter lying directly between himself and the Divine Being. His outward conformity to all just laws and good institutions will be, not the less, but the more, perfect because his scale of obligation is an individual one, the spring and motive of his actions a deeply inward one. Church and state gain in soundness and efficiency by every individual conscience that functions within their bounds. Religion of this sort leads away from human mediations, from confessions, benedictions, injunctions, and permissions of merely human authority. It confesses first to God, afterwards, if at all, to those whom its confessions can benefit. It brings its own thought to aid and illustrate the general thought. It cannot abdicate its own conclusions before any magnitude either of intellect or of age.

The Protestant, therefore, would be much straitened within the Greek limits. He is forced to teach those who will listen to him that God is much nearer than the priest, and that their own simple and sincere understanding of Christian doctrine is at once more just and more precious than the fallacies and sophisms of an absolute theology. Such teaching will scarcely be more relished by the Greek than by the Romish clergy; yet the Protestant must teach this, or be silent.