existence. It has often been shown in history that revolutions do not occur when the people who revolt are suffering most severely from oppression. In those dark and dismal days the power of tyranny is too great to allow of any hope of successful resistance, and the misery of its victims simply benumbs their minds and paralyses their energies. It is with the beginning of better times that the fatal spell of despotism is broken, and daring projects of independence are engendered. Then the slumbering emotions of patriotism awake from their unnatural lethargy and the tyrant's slaves remember that they are men. Thus it was in Greece at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Already it seemed as though the Ottoman rule was on its decline, its vigour decaying, its power of mischief shrinking. There were isles of Greece that had become virtually self-governing. Even the mainland was certainly not worse treated than previously; its cruelest oppressors were not the self-indulgent Turks, but those disgraceful Greeks, nominally fellow-Christians—the Phanariots. Another influence made the goad of tyranny felt more acutely, although it was not being applied more vigorously. This was the stirring of the Greek spirit itself. Findlay points out that it began with education. Greece had been singularly behind the rest of Europe, not so much in the degree of education, as in its nature. The modern spirit, with its revival of classical antiquity, which rose in the West with the Renaissance, was not known in Eastern Europe. The East had neither Renaissance nor Reformation—those two mighty factors of the world as we know it. The vast significance of that double negation can scarcely be over-rated.
Greece was still back in the Middle Ages, or rather in the later, the decadent patristic period. Her intellectual development had been arrested with the death of John of Damascus, the last of the Fathers. Since then her education had not been neglected; for centuries it was far in advance of that of the rude and brutal West, and it was always maintained in some quarters with pedantic assiduity. But it was patristic education, ecclesiastical education,
