education in the dead theology of an effete Church. All life and soul, all adventure of speculation, all passion of poetry, had long since withered out of it. And while it harked back on the past it did not go far enough in that direction to find inspiration. It cared nothing for the glories of ancient Hellas. It prided itself in Chrysostom, not in Plato. Its boast was the orthodoxy of its Church, not the art, poetry, and heroism of its ancestry. It did not look back beyond Constantinople; it never found in Athens a name to conjure with.
Then a new spirit awoke. The Greeks were roused to remember that they were the descendants and heirs of the most magnificent classical antiquity. The educational reform was commenced by Eugenios Bulgares of Corfu, who introduced it to Joannina, Mount Athos, and Constantinople. This alarmed the conservative ecclesiastics and annoyed the time-serving Phanariots, whose influence with the sultan put a check to it. But it was welcomed in Russia, whither Eugenios was invited in the year 1775, and where he was made bishop of Sclavonia and Kherson. He wrote a book on religious toleration which still more irritated the dignitaries of his Church, and called forth a reply by Anthimus the patriarch of Jerusalem. This miserable sycophant congratulated the Greeks on having escaped the artifices of the devil to which Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists had all succumbed, and gave his version of the rise of the Ottoman Empire as a mark of the particular favour of heaven to protect them against the Western heresy with which the last of the Byzantine emperors were infected. Eugenios was followed by Adamantius Korais, a native of Chios, who settled in Paris, and put modern Greek into a literary form. At the same time, he urged the principles of religious liberty and endeavoured to rouse his people from the intellectual torpor of orthodox bigotry. Under these influences the Greeks began to realise their nationality and to dream dreams of the revival of their great past.
Nevertheless, the early chapters of the story of the
