Even under these difficulties, literature and the arts might have flourished, if Constantinople had been able to give to the new converts even its degraded Byzantine culture, or if there had not been other powerful causes that militated against a development from within. In the west of Europe the Latin language of the Church did not interfere with an early national literature. Latin was the language of the learned, whether clerical or lay, and mediated an intellectual intercourse between the most distant members of the universal faith. At the same time, the native dialects had received an impulse before the introduction of Christianity, often under the influence of Rome, and they were left to shift for themselves and to find their votaries. The case was quite different in Russia. The Bulgarian language, which was brought in with the gospel, at once usurped on the native Russian to the great disadvantage of the latter. Being closely related to the spoken Russian, Bulgarian was easily acquired by the clergy, but it was not close enough to become the literary language of the people. On the one hand, this new gospel language could at best connect Russia with Byzantium by way of Bulgaria; on the other, Russian was looked down upon as a rude dialect and was discouraged, together with every symptom of the popular creation which was looked upon as intimately connected with ancient paganism. This Bulgarian language was not long preserved in its purity. Detached from its native home, it was immediately transformed in pronunciation, so as to conform to the spoken Russian; thus, for example, it at once lost its nasals, which were not familiar to the Russian ear. In the course of time, words and constructions of the people’s language found their way into the Church-Slavic, as the Bulgarian was then more properly called. Naturally, many words, referring to abstract ideas and the Church, passed from the Bulgarian into the spoken tongue. Thus, the two dialects, one the arbitrary literary language, the other, the language of every-day life, approached each other more and more. At the present time, the Russian of literature contains a large proportion of these Church-Slavic words; the language of the Bible and the liturgy is the Church-Slavic of the sixteenth century, which differs so much from the original Bulgarian that, though a Russian reads with comparative ease this Church-Slavic, he has to study Bulgarian as a German would study Old German. This Church-Slavic of the Russian redaction has also been, and still is, in part, the ecclesiastical language of the other Greek-Catholic countries of the Slavs.