So far as intellectual life is concerned they will find that the above words apply with equal truth even to the great monastic republic of Mount Athos, which, during the Middle Ages, was so noted a center of Greek learning. For, sad to relate, one finds even there the same intellectual apathy and decay as elsewhere, and its seven and more thousand monks are to-day as dead set against scholarship as when they indignantly razed the school which Eugenius Bulgaris, the greatest Greek scholar of the eighteenth century, had there established in their own behoof. It is the recollection of all these things--“the remembering in misery the happy time”--combined with the kind and generous invitation of Leo XIII to return to the Church of their fathers, that has swelled the ranks of that long-existent party in the Orthodox Church known as the λατεινόφοροντες--Latin-favorers--who have always deplored schism and who would use all their influence to bring it to an early termination. This party, which has long groaned under the Erastianism of the Czar and the absolutism of the Sublime Porte, is only biding its time to seize an opportunity to return to its allegiance to the Pope. Professor Harnack, whose competency to express an opinion in this matter no one will question, declared in a notable pronouncement on the encyclical Præcala of Leo XIII that: People who understand Russia know that there is a patriotic Russian party--or rather tendency--in the heart of the country, in Moscow and among the most educated people, that hopes for a movement of their Church in the direction of the Western Church--that is of the Roman, not the Evangelical Communion--who work for this and who see in it the only hope of Russia. This party manifests its ideas in writing, so far as circumstances in Russia allow, and has already shown that it possesses men of unusual talent, warm love of their country and undoubted devotion to the Greek Church. They have also considered how they shall reconcile Russia’s traditions and world-power with a change in her Church affairs that shall harmonize with the views of Rome and they believe in its possibility.[348] If the Latin-favorers could now find a leader of commanding personality there is good reason to believe that the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches would not be far distant. Had Russia a pious and forceful monarch like her saintly Apostle, King Vladimir, or had Constantinople a Patriarch of the zeal and influence of St. Theodore of Studium, the great majority of the Orthodox Church, who know nothing about the origin of the existing schism, would follow such a leader without hesitation. And so slight would be the change in faith, in consequence of reunion, that the great mass of the faithful would scarcely be conscious of it. Their faith would remain exactly the same as it was before the schism.