Roman empire of the east, nor by the ferocity of the Tatars. “A white Arab,” a child of nature, uncorrupted by the iniquities of an ancient civilization, with his ardent Oriental temperament, he retained as yet much of the simplicity, the freedom from duplicity, that won the recognition of Homer, Choerilius and Strabo. The introduction of Greek Christianity was a fact of immeasurable significance to the Russian realm. It proscribed the Papal Church from Russian territory, and thereby isolated it from the nations of the west. This isolation precluded the Russian people from the religious sympathy, the material support of the Pope, and of the other European nations, in crises of peril, or periods of emergency, such as that of the appalling Tatar invasion. They could look for no help beyond their own resources, their own strength. The difference of religion served also as a perpetual barrier, a continually irritating antagonism between the Russian and the Polish Slavs. On the other hand, as the new faith was introduced by means of the Slavonic, the mother tongue, Russian society was spared the sharp division between the clerical, the learned, the high, Latin-speaking class, and the lower classes that compose the bulk of every nation; a division that contributed immensely to the founding of caste and to the arrogations of a hierarchy throughout Latin Christendom. In Russia was reared a national church, subject to no foreign, no alien sway, entangled with no foreign alliances or foreign politics. Thus was secured an absolute national and ecclesiastical independence. “No dragonnades, no frightful inquisition, no Saint Bartholomews, no myriads of martyrs, no hideous tortures, such as those invented and practiced by Jesuits and Romish priests, have ever defiled the venerable ministry that traces its origin to Ephesus and Saint John.”