The recent history of the near East conveys a similar lesson. For generations the Turkish autocracy was able to keep down the Christian peoples under its rule by means of their mutual hates. It was not community of religion that brought about the Balkan and Greek combination of 1912: it was military and political calculation; and the overthrow of Turkey was no sooner completed than the Christian combatants were on the verge of war with each other. Between Greek and Bulgarian there seems to be to-day the same animosity as existed in the Dark Ages; and Greek orthodoxy declaims against the "irreligion" of educated Bulgaria, while the mass of the Bulgarian people remains as superstitious as that of Greece. As regards standards of conduct, the former seem to have capped every savagery of which Turkish irregulars have ever been guilty. Whatever may be the outcome of freedom for self-development in the light of western civilization, there is plainly nothing to choose as between Christian and Moslem moral material in those regions after two thousand years of Christianity. Such facts bring out once for all the sociological truth as to the part played by Christianity in civilization. The progress of the more advanced States has not been caused by creed. If that were the lifting factor, Abyssinia should be on the same plane with the leading European States. Once more, it is not Christianity that has civilized modern Europe, but the variously caused and conditioned progress of Europe that has civilized Christianity; even as the conditions and forces of ancient Hellas civilized its paganism. Such tests are of course not those that will be first put by a scrupulous mind seeking to know whether the Christian creed be true. Rather they are forced on such a mind by the tactics of believers, who as a rule seek to evade the fundamental issue. It is not unlikely, therefore, in view of present painful experience, that for some time to come the stress of defence will shift to the attempt, never entirely abandoned, to defend the faith on evidential or philosophic grounds. We have thus to consider finally the apparent effects of Christian credences and institutions on the intellectual life of the time. § 2. Intellectual Influence