n Victoria, thus it
will be, we may predict, for the Greek Church is jealous of every iota of
its creed, _in secula seculorum_.

Well does a living writer remark, "Such as the Greek Church became on the
extinction of Paganism, such, or nearly such, she seems to be now. Her
missionary work has been narrow, her moral influence and control at home
small, and though she has preserved a rigid continuity of doctrinal form,
the principle of an ever-expanding and all-absorbing vitality has been
wanting; in great cities her prelates have too frequently been the slaves
of wealth and power, of courtly intrigue and political faction; in the
desert her monks have become dreamy and unpractical anchorites. No lands
reclaimed, no centres of agriculture and civilization created, no
literature preserved, no schools founded, no human beings raised to a
higher sphere of social action and duty, are to be set down to the
account of the Greek Church. She is a fragment of old Byzantine
civilization, as rigid and angular as the mosaics that still adorn and
seem to frown down from the walls of her churches."

CHAPTER V.
THE ROMAN CATHOLICS.

If we may quote the Eastern Church, the Roman Catholic Church is the
greatest heresy of modern times. In the Encyclic Epistle of the Eastern
Patriarchs, the Papal system is referred to as "the chief heresy of the
latter days, which flourishes now, as its predecessor, Arianism,
flourished before it in the earlier ages, and which, like Arianism, shall
in like manner be cast down and vanish away." "I die in the faith of the
Catholic Church before the disunion of East and West," were the last
words of Bishop Ken. Under the Stuarts, in solemn conclave the Anglicans
accused the Romanists of idolatry. In the opinion, then, of the oldest
Church, the only Church with an indisputable apostolical succession, and
in the opinion of some of England's greatest Churchmen, the Church of
Rome is an heretical one. Such is the conclusion to which also we are
driven by the very slightest historical inquiry. Lady Herbert wonders
that an Anglican Churchman can go to Jerusalem and not become a Romanist.
Why, as the priest takes you from one sacred station to another, shows
you where the Saviour fainted beneath the load of the cross, where Saint
Veronica wiped His face with her handkerchief, where the print of the
Saviour's foot yet remains,--when we all know that the Jerusalem of the
Saviour's time is some eight