One cannot pronounce the same judgment on Greece and Italy.  The decay in Greece is economic and civic, poverty of resource and resources on one side, and on the other invincible insubordination, refusal in the individual to submit to discipline or sacrifice, the conceit of a dead and forgotten superiority which makes progress or docility impossible.  The measure of apparent renovation in Athens and some other points is owing to the influence and benefactions of the Greeks who have lived and prospered in other lands, where their natural mental activity has borne fruit, but the normal progress of the nation is so slight that it has no chance in the race of races now being run in the Balkans.  But the Greeks are preserved from a moral decay like that which threatens Italy by the domestic morality, due in part to temperament, but in part also to the influence of the clergy, who, if not scholars and wise theologians, are generally men of pure domestic morality and leaders of the common people.  The Orthodox Church is national, lives with and for the people, has no political ambitions, and cannot endanger the state.

In Italy the danger is other.  The Roman Church has long ceased to be a distinctly religious institution; it has become a great human machine organized, disciplined like an army, for a war of shadows and formalities, but now employed in the conquest of political influence, a kingdom absolutely of this world.  It is as much a foreign body in Italy (or France) as if it were the Russian Church; it has no part or lot in the well-being of the Italian people, and, so far as the central power of it is concerned, the Vatican and its councils, its only purpose is to acquire political influence for its own political aggrandizement, to the exclusion from its field of operations of all other creeds.  For the attainment of this end it works with the single-eyedness which Christ recommended for other ends, to the neglect of all pressure on the people in the direction of common morality.  The Pope, in the present case an amiable, excellent ecclesiastic, is only one part of this machine, and through him it speaks, saying, practically, to the Italian people, “Be what you please, do what you please; only in all things which we command obey us,”—­obedience to the prescriptions of rites and ceremonies being, so far as my observation during my years of residence in Italy goes, considered as of far greater importance than the observance of the laws of sexual morality, veracity, or common honesty.  The rule of conduct of the parochial clergy has appeared to me to be to keep their influence over their flocks in purely ecclesiastical matters, and run no risk of straining that influence by interfering with their personal morality, or by making Christianity the difficult rule of life which it is in Puritan countries.