It was they who did so much to insure the triumph of the vernaculars of Western Europe, but then Latin was so different even from French and Italian that it was impossible to confuse the old and the new. The case with Church Slavonic was different. It had entered in large part into the phraseology of the peasants, it had colored the speech of the villages, and while it was not flexible and not adapted to the needs of the population as a medium of expression, it was too close to it to be cast off without regret and without remorse. Muscovite had already freed itself and become a modern language. The similarities between Muscovite Great Russian, Ukrainian and Church Slavonic were such that Russianizing influences could argue that there was no need to adapt Ukrainian to every-day literary use and that if the Church Slavonic were to be abandoned, Russian should be used in its place. The very unnational and religious attitude of the Kievan School all too often seemed to bear out this interpretation, and with each succeeding decade, the doom of the native speech seemed to be more surely impending. The action of the Russian ecclesiastical censorship after the destruction of the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church seemed to be working in the same way, for the Church books were henceforth to be remodelled on the Russian Church Slavonic, even though that had been at one time really reformed on the Ukrainian pattern by the scholars who had gone from Kiev to Moscow in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, the Uniat Church did preserve the old Ukrainian Church Slavonic books. The result was the same, for their conservatism led them to preserve the old as a sacred tradition and to the devout members of the Uniat Church, it likewise seemed almost heretical to change the accepted forms and to seek to bring them in touch with the language of the uneducated people. The pride of these poorly educated priests in their superior knowledge worked as well as the conceit of the nobles and the censorship of Moscow to put apparently insuperable barriers in the way of adapting the ordinary language to practical and literary purposes, and added to the general conviction of the educated that the Ukrainian language was finished as a potent factor in the educated life of the day. Yet we would be much mistaken if we regarded this as a purely Ukrainian problem. Wherever the Church Slavonic liturgy had penetrated, whether in communion with Constantinople or with Rome, the same problem inevitably arose. The language question, the burning discussion as to whether the written language was to be that of the people or of the Church, was actively considered everywhere. Russia was the first to solve the problem and to restrict the Church language to the Church. The Serbs in the Balkans and the Bulgarians were destined to have the same conflict.