ye shall
find peace unto your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."
To appreciate these words aright you must fancy yourself a Jew, weighed
down to the earth by the daily routine of painful ceremonial and the
rigid requirements of inelastic law.

CHAPTER IV.
THE GREEK CHURCH.

In the dark ages of Christianity, when the zeal and purity of the early
professors and martyrs of the new creed had died away; when Constantine,
anxious to fix his throne on a permanent basis, entered into an alliance
with priests and bishops, not satisfied with the humble position assigned
them in the Church, only by courtesy at that time to be called
Apostolical; there was a revival of an old abuse, or rather, of a Pagan
principle--the alliance of Church and State. Dr. Arnold, the truest
Churchman in modern times, believed that the national conversions to
Christianity, which then became the fashion, were productive of immense
evil. This is the opinion long held by Dissenters, and latterly by an
increasing number of independent inquirers. If so, Constantine was an
arch-heretic; for surely, when Christ had taught that His kingdom was not
of this world, it was heresy to disbelieve it, and, in the very teeth of
such a declaration, to introduce an ecclesiastical system founded upon
compulsion, ignoring altogether the Divine power of Christianity, and
assuming that it could only be maintained by the sword and pay of the
State.

Constantine's empire has vanished, but his Church remains; and it speaks
to us, as Dean Stanley says, in the only living voice which has come down
to us from the Apostolic Church: the State Churches of Europe, including
even the pretentious one at Rome, are but its children. It is the
pattern and model for them all. Greek was the original tongue of the
early Christians. It was at Antioch, a Greek city, the birthplace of
Ignatius, of Chrysostom, of John of Damascus, that they were first called
by the name which now denotes the noblest form of human development. In
the Old World or the New, the Councils to which Churchmen in all ages
have referred, as of equal, or almost of equal, authority with the Bible,
were Eastern. In them the Pope of Rome was considered but as a Bishop in
the midst of his equals. The great fathers of the Church wrote in Greek.
Dean Stanley says, the earliest fathers of the Western Church, Clemens,
Irenaeus, Hermas, Hippolytus, did the same. St. Mark first preached his
Go