character of the ordinary clergy and the people, and tending to keep them down to a low level of intelligence and knowledge. This would furnish an excuse for a great deal, if there had been an evident struggle of the hierarchy to do their best in remedying the evil. Instead of doing this, they are the principal causes of the perpetuation and aggravation of this degraded state. Since the decay of the Ottoman power commenced, the clergy have had it in their power to bid defiance in great measure to the Turkish government. They have been able to control immense sums of money and to wield a great commercial and financial influence. They might have employed the intervention of Christian powers, and especially of Russia, if they had been governed by enlightened and Christian motives, in order to gain just rights and the means of improvement for their people. The Ottoman government, itself, has come to a more just and liberal policy, in which it would have welcomed the aid of the Christian hierarchy, had there been one worthy of the name. Their complete apathy at all times to everything which concerns the spiritual and moral welfare of their subjects will warrant no other conclusion than that they have practically apostatized from the faith and church of Christ, and are mere intruders into the fold which they lay waste and ravage. In their attitude toward the Catholic Church and the Holy See, the hierarchy of the patriaichate are ignorantly, violently, and obstinately schismatical, and even heretical. The public and official teaching of the Eastern Church is orthodox, and therefore no one is adjudged to be a heretic simply because he adheres to that communion. One who intelligently and obstinately adheres to a schism as a state of permanent separation from the See of St. Peter, is, however, at least a constructive heretic, and is very likely to be a formal heretic, on several doctrines which have been defined by the Catholic Church. The nature of the opposition of the clergy of Constantinople to the Roman Church, the grounds on which they defend their contumacious rebellion, and the dogmatic arguments which they employ in the controversy, are such as to place them in the position of the most unreasonable and contumacious schismatics, and as it appears to our judgment, in submission to that of more learned theologians, of heretics also. So far as their influence extends, and it is very great, they are chiefly accountable for the isolated condition of the entire non-united Eastern Church. As the ambition of the Patriarch of Constantinople was the original cause of the schism, so now the ignorant and violent obstinacy of the clergy of the patriarchate, and their supreme devotion to their own selfish and narrow personal and party interests, is, in connection with a similar though less odious spirit in the chief Muscovite clergy, and the worldly policy of the Russian czar, the chief cause of its perpetuation.