THE ABBE DE ST. MICHON'S RELIGIOUS JOURNEY IN THE EAST. *

LIE author of this vivacious volume of Oriental travel was at- tached as botanist to De Saulcy's scientific expedition to the Holy Land : his object, however, was far higher than the collecting of plants—neither more neither less than the union of all the Churches of Christendom and the East under the wing of the Pope The Abbe de St. Miehon addressed to his Holiness a memorial on the matter, in which, after pointing out his experience among Pro- testant clergymen, and his ideas that the fulness of time was come with regard to Western Europe, he offered his services in the Orient; being open, as commercial gentlemen have it, to another • Narrative of a Religious Journey in the East, in 1850 and 1851. By the Abbe de St. itiehon. Published by Bentley. commission. The memorial was left unanswered in spite of • its rhetoric and its promises ; but the Abbe still devoted himself to the task—probably satisfied that he should not be disavowed if he succeeded.

The religious object of the traveller gave a purpose to his tea.. vels, and he has gathered some curious facts respecting the " schismatics " of Greece and Turkey in Europe ; for his book stops short at the more important places Syria and Palestine, or there is another volume to come. The author has also some lively de- scriptions of Oriental priests and congregations, with some cri- ticisms and suggestions on church architecture. No one but a sanguine Frenchman with a theory could imagine there was ranch chance for a union with Rome, or rather (except on some small local matters) a submission to Rome ; since the Greeks hate the Romanists, and the Armenians do not like them. The true odium theologieum of the Greek clergy might possibly yield to the supe- rior education which the Greeks are planning for their clergy ; but, as the Abbe sees, this superior education may also sharpen their wits for the subtilties of controversy. There is also the element of national pride, which forbids yielding to a foreign power ; and, what one would hardly have expected, the pride of orthodoxy, which looks even upon the Russian Church as almost schismatic. "The clergy of Greece are very strict as to orthodoxy. They regard the Russians as degenerate Christians : they love them, because they love the power of Russia, beneath which they shelter themselves but as regards themselves, the orthodox clergy, the Russians appear a species of schismatics. It is needless to say that they have a great repugnance to Catholics. When a Catholic or an Armenian wishes to enter into the Greek communion, he is rebaptized. If he is a priest, they rebaptize him and leave him in the rank of the faithful They do not look upon his ordination as valid. The Rus- sians act otherwise. They satisfy themselves with the profession of faith of him who leaves other Christian communions ; and if he is either bishop or priest, they leave him his dignity, and recognize the validity of his conse- cration."

The Roman Catholic cure at Athens, in whose church the Abbe officiated, gave him a practical idea of the estimation in which Romish priests are held at Athens.

"October 20.—This day, Sunday, I have been to celebrate mass in the Catholic church of Athens. It is situated at the foot of the Acropolis, at a little distance from the Tower of the Winds.

"Nothing can be smaller or more insignificant than this church ; it is a modern building, without any kind of architecture, and completely bad. I met with the kindest welcome from the cure of Athens ; who gave me, with the greatest willingness, all the information I wished ft): as to the religious state of the city. There are only about two thousand Catholics at Athens, and the greater proportion of them are not Greeks; they are either Italians or Maltese. The preaching is not in Greek but in Italian. This is an ex- cellent plan to prevent the Greeks, who have a strong feeling of nationality, from ever hearing the Catholics preach. The cure of Athens complained much of the Greek clergy, and of the prejudices which they eneourige among the people against the Church of Rome. If you wish to judge of it yourself,' said he, you have only to walk along the streets in your cassock and on all sides you will hear called out a Greek word meaning exeentioner. The Greek clergy have succeeded in persuading the people, that if they re- ceive extreme unction from the hands of a Catholic priest, it is sufficient to cause death.' "

The Abbe's plan for carrying out his scheme is by means of an ecumenical council. The Greeks, he says, will never yield to any- thing else, because in yielding to the Pope they would seem to be submitting to foreign authority, which would not be the case in an universal council. But there are geographical difficulties. The Western nations might not like to send to the East ; the Eastern nations would not like sending to the West. There is also Russia in the way, according to the Latin Archbishop of Pero.

"M. the Patriarchal Vicar received me with extraordinary kindness. In him I found a man of superior mind, who perfectly understood the religious question, and who spoke to me upon it at length, and with remarkable im- partiality and great judiciousness. Among the difficulties in the way of bringing together an cecumenical council, M. Hillereau places that of making the Greeks come to it. They would not like to displease the Emperor of Russia, whose coreligionists they are. In case the (ecumenical council were convened in any city of the East of Europe, he would convene one in his own dominions, and oppose the orthodox Greek Church to the Catholic Church; which would render the schism still more violent. He owned, how- ever, that this difficulty ought not to stop the projected council; that seve- ral circumstances might arise and render the opposition of Russia less vio- lent than is commonly supposed."

If the Abbe put forth in his memorial the notions he appears to entertain of a council to override the Pope, and some other doc- trines which smack of Galilean independence, it is scarcely .sur- prising that his lively lucubration was received in silence. He is, however, a catholic-minded man apart from his professional Itomanism, and can recognize the religious feeling in other churches, and even in Mahometanism.

"It was at Smyrna that I first saw the Oriental at his prayers ; it was one of the people, a poor Mussulman, a camel-driver, that afforded me this touching sight. The hour of prayer had been announced from the minarets, and I had stopped to look into a large court filled with goods. The camels lay down, and ruminated in silence. All at once I saw the man take off his cloak, spread it out upon the planks of a shed where he was at the an- nouncement of prayers' and then, without troubling himself in the least about the presence of the European who followed him with watchful eycs, he began to call upon God ; making the customary prostrations, and reciting aloud his prayers. I confess that this public act of adoration made a deep impression upon me. Prayer gives to man much greatness: I saw a man whose occupation was hard and whose life was abject, seeking in God a miti- gation of his pain, and an hour of reform for mind and body."

It is not only on religion that the Abbe's catholicity is felt : everything that passes before him is a subject for inquiry and description,—very often, it is true, with the theorizing sufficiency or the open vanity of a Frenchman, always with his animation and his ingenuity. Antiquity, art, manners, men, and natural science, as they come before him, form the subject of his pen, and often give rise to judicious observations. Take the following on the Grecian plough. "I was stirprised to see frequently in the Peloponnesus, mountains with very arid sod, tilled notwithstanding with infinite pains. This is because man is here beyond the reach of pernicious fevers, which often decimate the populations of the plains. .0n the other hand, we must not judge of the agriculture of these coun- tries by our own view. When we see the little ploughs of the Greeks, which scarcely raise two inches of earth, we are tempted to say, What a pity our good ploughs are not here to plough the land thoroughly !' It would be an error to use them, and also lost labour. In hot climates it is not ne- fe::7to turn up the earth to render it fertile. There is too much to be from the heat. Far from dividing it and raising the lower beds, it must be left at its natural level. Provided that the seed that is sown can germinate in its first development, it wants no more ; it requires a hardened soil, that the fibres of the root may penetrate the beds of earth still fresh from the want of labour. There is an old routine amongst a people which is often great wisdom' because it is the fruit of experience.

"Our husbandry would in Greece only render the most fertile land a heap of cinders. Plants would grow rapidly, but they would soon be withered beneath a burning temperature, and the wind would scatter the soil like a sandy desert.

It is probable that the plough of the modern Greeks has never under- gone any change, and that it is still the ancient plough. I have examined it with attention, and I have sketched it several times in Attica and in the Peloponnesus, and in comparing these drawings with those which I made afterwards of the plough in Palestine, I could scarcely, find any difference. It primitive simplicity, not to say primitive rudeness. '

This is a very happy geological illustration ; the fact already known, but the exhibition novel.

"December 17.—We left Tyre on a delicious spring day. We had not, generally, any other track than the sand of the sea-shore. It is the ever- lasting road that Nature herself has marked out. The waves come every in- stant, and leave as they die away a light deposit of small grains of sand sus- pended in them ; then they gently draw back, and the water which pene- trates the lower beds hardens them, and prevents the foot of man, horse, or camel, from sinking down. How often, on the beautiful coast of Syria I have enjoyed the curious sight furnished by the sea in triturating the senile. Some pebbles of a silicious nature, disengaged from the abrupt sides of the headland which juts out into the sea, are thrown into large bays which divide these promontories. This is the work of violent tempests. The sea, by in- flux and reflux, keeps these pebbles in a state of perpetual movement ; they go backwards and forwards with the wave which holds them; thus they rub one against the other, and the infinitely small particles which are detached by this rubbing rise up in the water, which they whiten as though with chalk, and, carried away by it, they spread themselves on the margin in brilliant sheets of small thickness. After the wave has deposited the sand it holds, the small pebbles which it had dragged along with it fall back by their own gravity into the sea to undergo another trituration, until the whole is disintegrated. The tempests still bring more materials, on which the proem is continued.

"It is thus that on the coast of Syria these masses of sand are heaped up, which, little by little, fill up the little gulfs at the expense of the projecting rocks which skirt the sea."

The subject of the Turks is incidentally discussed by the Abbe, with some of the inconsistency which characterizes other writers, but with less than many. Of the moral qualities of the Turks he speaks favourably ; but he has no hopes of their political re- generation.

The superior of the Lazarists was at that time in France, but. his tem- porary successor was full of kindness to me. His conversation greatly in- terested me. Like all the missionaries and monks that I had seen in the East, he gave me a very high character of the Turks. M. de Lamartine has been much found fault with for giving them such a character ; it related chiefly to their honesty and fidelity to their word. The promise of a Turk is sacred ; he would not break it for all the world.

"He gave a very different account of the Greeks. A Greek will give you his signature, a mortgage, everything that you ask for ; yet he will find a way to shuffle and cheat you if he can. Generally speaking, I have found everywhere, but chiefly at Jerusalem, this traditional hatred of the Greeks. The misfortunes which the historians of the Crusades have attributed to them are well known. As an impartial judge in the matter, I must say that I have found these complaints against the Greeks very exaggerated. I have found them nearly always springing from religious rivalry, which hardly knows how to hold the balance.

"As an upright and peaceful race they [the Turks] deserve our interest. We see that they try to do right. They are not wanting in good intentions, but in activity and energy. The look of the Turk is mild, and his lips soon fall into a smile : he is silent, like a man of no ambition, no care about the future : he is a lover of justice, and an observer of hospitality, like all Mus- sulmans. His trustworthiness is remarkable. In the great cities of the East, as Smyrna and Constantinople, all the porters are Turks. The keys of ware- houses, into into which they go and come at all hours, are intrusted to them, and they have never been known to betray this confidence."

The following is the summary of our author's opinion of the Turkish empire, and part of his contribution towards the settle- ment of the Eastern question.

"Will the Turkish nation ever rise from its profound decay ? "A hundred times I put this question to myself during my travels ; and I always solved it in this way. The Turkish empire as at present consti- tuted, cannot be maintained. This long corpse, the emaciated limbs of which stretch from the Bosphorus to the sands of Arabia, is at its last gasp. Its agony may be prolonged, but it can never rise again with vigorous life. There are whole provinces belonging to this empire only in name. Such is Syria. The Arab race is dominant there ; and whenever it is minded to establish its independence, it has only to give a signal. It will not require, like unhappy Greece, a violent and desperate struggle.

"All the intelligent men that we met in our travels, Englishmen, Rus- sians, and others, carry from the East the same conviction. The Turkish people is now arrived at impotency.

"The Turks are a people in their second childhood ; they want to grow up again, and again arrive at maturity. But they must sink under the bur- den of an empire too heavy for their feeble shoulders. The Turkish nation requires the peaceable possession of the countries in Asia Minor, where it is now dominant; but Armenia, Syria, Arabia, the islands of the Archipelago, and Turkey in Europe, should be declared independent, either with a native government or under the protectorate of the Great Powers of Europe. It is absurd in diplomatists obstinately to prolong the seat of the Turks at Con- stantinople. They thus sacrifice even the true interests of this honest People. Give them, as Lamartine has poetically said, brooks and flowers; consign them to a rustic life; but release them from the political part that you make them play, by keeping them, against all their own instincts, in the great civilized family of Europe, which they cordially detest, because they attribute to us their degradation. Besides, they understand nothing of

the movement which carries us forward, and in which they find themselves out of place. It is the honest cottager in the luxurious drawingroom of great man : he makes hula sorry figure, and is very uncomfortable there."