as ever a Balkan State gets independent of the Sultan it makes its Church independent of the Patriarch; they will not let their metropolitans any longer obey the authority at Constantinople, which seems to them to be all too closely allied to their enemy the Porte. So it has become a regular principle that wherever there is a free State, there shall there be a free and independent national Church. It is again the old Byzantine idea of making the Church follow the vagaries of civil politics, that we saw to be the root of the claims of the See of Constantinople, and indeed the original root of the great schism. Only the idea is turned against the very see that had grown and flourished on it. And that see finds the national and political idea much less sympathetic now that she stands to lose by it. The principle of the independent Church in the independent State finds no favour in the Phanar. The Patriarchs worked so hard and grovelled so low in the old days for the sake of getting a big Patriarchate, naturally they do not like losing it piece by piece, as they have done throughout the 19th century. The process is nearly always the same. As soon as the first National Assembly, or House of Deputies, or whatever it may be, of the new State meets, it passes a law that the national Orthodox Church of the land acknowledges no Head but Christ; it then forms a Holy Synod on the Russian model, giving all possible authority over the Church to the civil government ("no Head but Christ" always means this), and lastly sends a note to the Patriarch to inform him that he has ceased to reign in the land in question. Of course the Patriarch is furious, generally begins by excommunicating the new schismatics in a mass, but eventually has to accept things (Russia makes him do so as a rule), and, swallowing his pride, he receives the Holy Synod as his "Sister in Christ." Only in the quite specially bitter case of the Bulgarian Church has he hitherto refused, and the Bulgars are still excommunicate. But here, too, he will have to give in at last.
Naturally the Phanar hates the national idea; in 1872 it held a synod to declare that Philetism[1] (the love of one's race in ecclesiastical matters) is the latest and most poisonous heresy. But it is a most astonishing case of poetic justice. It was on
- ↑ φίλος and ἔτης.
