A thought that comes up very often while one deals with the Greek in Hellenic lands, is the wonder at the tenacity of the religion of the Greek, surviving the hostility not only of the Turk, but of his fellow Christian of the rival creed. No other nation has ever endured the hostile pressure on its religious fidelity which the Greeks have had to submit to since the fall of Constantinople. The Venetians were even more cruel with the Greeks under their rule than the Turks have ever been, and the influence of the Papal See has always been exerted with the most inflexible persistence for the suppression of what in Rome is called the Greek schism, to which it has shown an animosity greater even than that displayed toward the Protestant Church. And yet I have always found the Orthodox Church in all its ramifications the most charitable and liberal of all the forms of Christianity with which I have come in contact. No stranger is turned from the doors of a Greek convent or refused such succor as is in the power of its inmates, be he Protestant, atheist, or even of their bitterest enemies, the Roman Catholics. No questions are ever asked, and it has twice happened to me that I have lodged at a Greek convent during the most rigid fasts of the Church, when the inmates sat down to a dinner of herbs and dry bread, while to me was given the best their resources could compass--a roast lamb or kid, generally. The _kalogeros_ in attendance, when I was dining on one occasion with the prior of a convent on Good Friday, and ate flesh when the prior himself had nothing but herbs and bread, turned to his superior with a perplexed smile, saying, "Why! he is not even a Christian!" but was none the less cordial afterward--he evidently had no other feeling than that of pity that a man who had been their protector (it was in Crete during the insurrection) should not enjoy the privileges of the Church. This liberal hospitality on the part of the ecclesiastics makes the want of it on the part of the people all the more conspicuous and inexplicable.