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better. Such is the city upon which you look down from St. Paul's rock on the Areopagus, and its unsightly meanness will not in the least interfere with your veneration for the august capital of Greece. Then immediately to your right rises the steep Acropolis, bounding the city to the south; then to the left of the Acropolis, that is, northward, stands a mountain, with a chapel on its summit, and which is either Lycabettus or Anchesmus, probably the latter; then the more distant scalp of Pentelicus; then another nearer and lower summit, which, differing from my chart, I hold to be the true Lycabettus. On the north and west runs the long olive-dotted plain of the Cephisus; yon line across it, lying like a thread over the uplands beyond, is the road to Eleusis. The Piræus is behind you, and the Acropolis is screening Hymettus. Such is the sketch of what you see from the Areopagus, a sight interesting from no natural features or picturesque effects; but it is Athens which you look upon: and, when the heart is filled, wherefore should the eye crave?

The evening before we left Athens we went up to the Acropolis for the last time, with a permission to stay till after dark, to see the Parthenon by moonlight. To look on anything for the last time is ever melancholy; but to wander among the columns of the Parthenon, and sit upon the steps of the Propylæa: to have Athens lying below you, and patches of softest sunlight resting on Piræus and the end of

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Hymettus, and Salamis for the last time, and Egina for the last time: and where Ilyssus runs, and where Cephisus, and Peloponnesus, and the Isthmian hills, and Colonos; and all this for the last time before we die. To go back to our little far-off island, and leave all this miracle behind; beholding it for all our afteryears brought near to us only by the pathetic power of memory, this is indeed mournful; a thing to make the heart swell, and the eye wet. And what a sunset, too, there was that night: so calm, so placid, with such soft lustrous scintillations in its beginning, and with such a wild, red, cloudy beauty, like the inspired eye of an angry seer, at its ending! Who would stay for the moon? She might come with clouds, and mar this sunset glory. We will not wait. We will not come again to-morrow. The Acropolis shall be left in the heart of that deep sunset; it shall live with us our lives long, with that eternal gilding round it. For every sense drinks in with jealous avidity the famous panorama; and we will carry it about with us now: a sight, an hour, a place to date from.

The Greek Church in Greece is in very disadvantageous circumstances, and the first impressions of a traveller are likely to be unfavourable. The shabby dirty edifices and ill-clothed priests are not likely to impress a man favorably. Yet, blessed be God, this ancient branch of His Son's Church is still, in this forlorn land, discharging, through the ancient Creeds and Apostolical Succession, her pro

phetical and sacerdotal offices. Her regal office is in abeyance.

The existence and condition of the Greek Church, however gloomy its prospects may be in the Greek peninsula, afford both consolation and admonition to ourselves. Let us look at the circumstances in which the Christians found themselves under the despotic exactions and tyrannous misrule of the misbelievers. They were subjected to every sort of cruel injustice which was likely to debase their characters; if their churches were burnt or decayed, they were not allowed to rebuild or repair them without permission from the authorities, a permission never to be obtained except at immense cost, and not unfrequently refused altogether. Independent of the vile indignities which met them at every turn in life, it was next to impossible for them to obtain justice in the Turkish courts, if their opponent was an infidel. At certain times the Turkish police inspected the Christian children of a district from eight years old and upwards, and carried off all the best made and ablest bodied amongst them, compelling them to become Mahometans. Patriarchs and bishops were made and unmade, elevated, deposed, re-elevated, deposed and strangled, either from a ferocious caprice, or a desire to extort money; in fact, there never has been a slavery so galling, so debasing, so systematically inhuman, so unmitigated by any alleviating circumstances, so unchequered by any tranquil times, as that which the Oriental Chris

tians, especially in the Greek peninsula, have endured at the hands of the foul Mahometans; and to our shame be it said, since the days of the great-minded popes who strove to renew the crusades, the protecting interference of the European powers has been rarely, feebly, and selfishly exerted in behalf of the suffering Christians. What has been done has, till lately, been chiefly by Russia; and however obviously it was her interest to make herself popular with the Christian subjects of the Porte, it is not to be believed that she has acted on no higher and more generous principle.

This iron hand pressed for years and years upon the unhappy land, till the most wonderful region of Europe became a dry, blighted, untilled, unpopulous waste of green plains and ruined cities. The iron hand is removed, and we discover Christ's holy catholic Church in full possession of her divine polity and apostolic forms; her metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, priests, deacons, sub-deacons, canonici, lectores, and lighters of the lamps; the regenerating water in her Fonts; the bloodless Sacrifice upon her Altars. Beneath that tremendous tyranny she was exercising her sacerdotal office under the shadow of her Master's wings. Neither was her prophetical office unfilled. She held the Creeds, and taught them to her children; she instructed them according to the teaching of the Councils in all things concerning the substance of the orthodox faith; while she elevated and consoled them by a three-fold

Liturgy, which, it is much to say, is inferior only to the Liturgy of western Christendom.

While, then, we acknowledge and adore the special Providence and abundant loving-kindness of God in preserving the Church amidst this untoward oppression, and in continuing to her the divine succession of the priesthood, and the right administration of the life-giving Sacraments, we may reverently enquire to what circumstances, under that Providence, the preservation and, in all essential points, the purity of the Greek Church is owing.

It is owing, in the first place, to her jealous preservation of the apostolic polity, and a devout clinging to those divine forms to which, as antiquity testified, it had pleased the Lord to tie His grace and promise of indefectibility. It would be easy to show how a humble belief in the supernatural grace of the blessed Sacraments, and a pure holding of the orthodox teaching regarding the Nature and Person of the Saviour, spring from the divine appointment of episcopacy, and are only secured by an adherence to it; but it would be out of place here. Yet it is instructive to note how the only heretical congregations, which have continued to live and abide upon the earth, are those which retained the episcopal succession; and it appears that, by God's blessing upon this humble clinging to this appointment, they have worked themselves clear of heresy. It seems admitted that the Nestorian Christians are now orthodox as to the Lord's unity of Person; and so far

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