Since the achievement of Greek independence, however, the people have remained substantially orthodox. Though they are no longer withheld from intercourse with the West, but have on the contrary shown a large measure of cosmopolitanism, their intellectual life has remained relatively fixed till the other day, the new complacency of independence backing the old complacency of orthodoxy. An excessive devotion to politics and political intrigue has absorbed the mental activity of the people; and literary veneration for the classic past has hampered the free play of intelligence on higher problems. The "Gospel Riots" at Athens a dozen years ago exhibited the state of real culture. On the urging of the Queen there had been made a translation of the New Testament into the living language of the people, or into one midway between that and the artificial academic tongue which has been developed among the literary class. About that period, however, what appears to be a more truly vernacular version began to be published in an Athenian journal; and it was against this that the students and others concerned directed their indignation, bringing about by their disturbances an actual change of ministry. Orthodox sentiment and orthodox ignorance appeared to be the moving forces; so that at the beginning of the twentieth century Greece could claim to be the most bigoted of Christian countries. Doubtless the consciousness of possessing the continuous apostolic tradition has been an important psychological factor in the special conservatism of belief, as is literary past-worship in the conservatism of speech. When we turn to Russia, where the creed of the Greek Church, though under an independent Patriarch, is that of the State, we find the usual phenomena of European intellectual life specially marked. In no other country, perhaps, is rationalism or indifference more nearly universal among the educated class, which is relatively small; and nowhere is faith more uncritical among the mass. Among them the use and adoration of icons--pictures or images of Jesus or the Madonna or of the saints, embellished in various ways--is universal in both private and public devotion; and a certain number of images, credited with miraculous virtue, earn great revenues for the monasteries or churches which possess them. The mass of the parish clergy (who like those of Greece may marry before ordination, but not a second time) are so ignorant as to be unconcerned about educated unbelief; and the Church as a whole has little or no political influence, being thoroughly subject to the political administration, or at least to the authority of the Tsar.