Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/219

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swiftly melted away in the heat of the new flame. Papa Eftim Effendi gave up his community rights and sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior followed him into the new Turkish Orthodox Church, agreeing to appoint no metropolitans except those who could read and write Turkish, who were of Ottoman parentage, who had lived at least five years in the country and who had abstained from "political activity." They agreed furthermore that metropolitans accused of secular crimes, instead of being immune from arrest without having first been degraded and then being subject to imprisonment only in the Oecumenical Patriarchate, were to be arrested and tried as any other Turkish subject would be. Moslems permitted a new personage called the Minister of Sacred Law to become an ordinary member of the Cabinet at Angora, and the huge wealth which was locked up in the country's Moslem endowments was opened and placed at the disposition of the provincial administrations. Moslem courts and schools were taken over by the Ministers of Justice and Education, respectively. Although American churchmen still thought in terms of the old Ottoman Empire, still played upon the old religious division between Moslems and Christians which had proved the ruin of them both, the new political force of nationalism was blending them in Turkey as in Syria, in Palestine and in Egypt. Nationalism is a strangely new and Western force in the East today and thus far Anatolia has clung to it in the face of every effort which Mr. Lloyd George and American churchmen could exert to throw the country back into the ruin of its bitter past.