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26
THE UNIATE EASTERN CHURCHES

statement on these points, and a defence of what he believes. You will find few schismatics who know anything about them at all, who even know what these questions mean.

So also in morals. The Uniate clergy have been brought up under the rigorously moral eye of Western missionaries; they have had years of the stern discipline of a seminary, in which the standard is the same as in ours. The schismatics have grown up anyhow in villages, in which there was little of any standard, and have been taken and ordained without any preparation at all.

Again, among the bishops and authorities of the Uniates, their union with Rome forces them to apply very much the same principles of conduct as obtain among us in the West. Tho Canon Law is revised and enforced by the Holy See. Among the others there are but the loosest principles, and Canon Law which is often a mere joke.

The disorders among the schismatics are the constant subject of regret or humour to travellers. You will not find so great disorders among the Uniates. The state of things which is almost a matter of course in great parts of the East, which Eastern people themselves admit and excuse as the result of their centuries of bondage (quite a fair excuse), is impossible among those who are in union with Rome. Their bishops would put it down ruthlessly and at once. If the bishop did not do so, he would hear from Propaganda. Whatever you may say about Rome, you cannot say that her discipline is slack.

Again, we must not exaggerate this. It is true that Uniate morals, as well as Uniate scholarship, are not always quite up to the Western standard. In remote parts of the Church abuses do go on for some time before they are found out and suppressed. But the point is that such abuses are always liable to be found out, and that then they certainly will be suppressed by the authorities at Rome. Among the schismatics there is no further authority beyond that of the Eastern people themselves, the very people whom long bondage under the Turk has made less scrupulous. There is no one to find out and no one to put down the abuses. So in morals, too, we may claim safely that the Uniates are the best among Eastern Christians. They have at least that salutary fear of Rome and what Rome will say, to repress the animalis homo.

I think any traveller in those parts will confirm this. As with the clergy, so it is with the laity. Go into the house of a Uniate, especially of a Uniate priest. It will perhaps not be