The whole incident is a very curious one, and shows
bow intense is the determination of the modern Greeks not to lose the slightest advantage in their task of • asserting their independent nationality and their right to represent the ancient Greeks. ' They thought they saw in • the Queen's evangelical zeal a plot to take away the exceptional• position possessed by them as the only nation in the Orthodox Church which does not require a translation of Holy Writ, and so to lower them to the Slavonic level. They consider, that is, the ability of the Greeks to read the New Testament in their own language—as all educated Greeks can do--as a sacred and exclusive privilege on the religious side. On the seculai side they are most anxious to maintain what they regard as the one link between them and the ancient Greeks which none can assert has ever been broken. They like to think that they can listen to the words which Paul used on the Areopagus exactly as the Athenians heard them nineteen hun- dt'ed years ago,
