Under these circumstances, religion to most of the people of the country became but a form and a mark of nationality. No conversion, in the ordinary sense of the word, was required for admission to the Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, or any of the Oriental Churches. All children were baptized in infancy and so grew up within the Church, with no religious instruction except as to fast and feast days and the proper forms to be employed in the ritual observed in the Churches. In all services the language used was no more understood by the people as a whole than Latin would be comprehended by an ordinary country audience in England or America. There was no educational or moral test for the priests except that they should be able to pronounce the words of the regular Church services and find the proper places from which to read. The writer once asked an Armenian priest where he studied. He said he was a baker and when he decided to become a priest he went to a monastery and studied for forty days. That comprised all of his schooling, except that he knew how to read simple narrative when he began. I asked him if he understood the ritual and the Scriptures that he read. He replied, “How should I know? This is the ancient Armenian.” Even as late as fifteen years ago it would have been difficult to find a Christian priest of any kind or class in the interior districts who clearly understood the ritual of the Church or the Scripture read in the service. Ordinarily the selection of priests was not based upon special ability, education, or moral worth. There were, of course, noble exceptions to this most general rule. The priests being such, and some of them most grossly ignorant and unfit, and there being in the Churches no religious instruction, it is easy to understand how the moral tone of these Oriental Churches sank rapidly under the rule of the Turk, with no power in themselves to rise above these conditions and institute a reform. A Church without a Bible, with an ignorant priesthood, with a ritual beautiful in itself but dead to the people, with no religious instruction and no test for church-membership, could not be expected in any land or in any age to keep itself unspotted from the world. Under these conditions Christianity came to be largely a name and the practises of religion only a form.