From Sicily the travellers visited Smyrna and Chios on their way to Constantinople. Pages of the diary are taken up with descriptions of churches, and functions attended in them, and it is of interest to note that, profoundly interested as Bute was in the Greek churches and the Greek liturgy, his religious sympathies were entirely with the Latin communion. The "spiritual deadness," as he calls it, of the schismatic churches of the East, repelled and dismayed him. "It strikes me as essentially dreadful," he writes of a visit to the Church of the Transfiguration at Syra, "that the Photian Tabernacle everywhere enshrines a deserted Saviour. The daily sacrifice is not offered; the churches are closed and cold, save for a few hours on Sunday and festivals; visits to the B. Sacrament are unknown. Pictures are exposed to receive an exaggerated homage, unknown and undreamt of in the West. But it is absolutely true to say that the Perpetual Presence (to which no reverence at all is offered, by genuflection or otherwise) receives less respect than one ordinarily pays to any place of worship whatever, even a meeting-house or synagogue." Later, recording a visit to the Greek cathedral at Pera, he describes the service there as "the most disagreeable function I ever attended: the church crammed with people in a state of restlessness and irreverence characteristic of Photian schismatics; and the whole service as much spoiled as slurring, drawling, utter irreverence, bad music, and bad taste could spoil it. After breakfast I {38} attended the High Mass at the Church of the Franciscans--a different thing indeed from the Photian Cathedral; and I went back there in the afternoon for Vespers and Benediction."