t are altogether
divorced, language becomes yet more distinctly the test of nationality
than it is in Western lands where nationality and government do to some
extent coincide. And when nationality and language do not coincide in
the East, it is owing to another cause, of which also we know nothing
in the West. In many cases religion takes the place of nationality; or
rather the ideas of religion and nationality can hardly be
distinguished. In the West a man's nationality is in no way affected
by the religion which he professes, or even by his change from one
religion to another. In the East it is otherwise. The Christian
renegade who embraces Islam becomes for most practical purposes a Turk.
Even if, as in Crete and Bosnia, he keeps his Greek or Slavonic
language, he remains Greek or Slave only in a secondary sense. For the
first principle of the Mahometan religion, the lordship of the true
believer over the infidel, cuts off the possibility of any true
national fellowship between the true believer and the infidel. Even
the Greek or Armenian who embraces the Latin creed goes far toward
parting with his nationality as well as with his religion. For the
adoption of the Latin creed implies what is in some sort the adoption
of a new allegiance, the accepting of the authority of the Roman
bishop. In the Armenian indeed we are come very near to the phenomena
of the further East, where names like Parsee and Hindoo, names in
themselves as strictly ethnical as Englishman or Frenchman, have come
to express distinctions in which religion and nationality are
absolutely the same thing. Of this whole class of phenomena the Jew is
of course the crowning example. But we speak of these matters here
only as bringing in an element in the definition of nationality to
which we are unused in the West. But it quite comes within our present
subject to give one definition from the southeastern lands. What is
the Greek? Clearly he who is at once a Greek in speech and Orthodox in
faith. The Hellenic Mussulmans in Crete, even the Hellenic Latins in
some of the other islands, are at the most imperfect members of the
Hellenic body. The utmost that can be said is that they keep the power
of again entering that body, either by their own return to the national
faith, or by such a change in the state of things as shall make
difference in religion no longer inconsistent with true national
fellowship.

Thus, wherever we go, we find lan