It is merely a fictitious distinction, as far as any meaning of the name in their natural sense goes. Indeed, "Melkite" seems specially inappropriate for Catholics; it has an Erastian sound, and, of course, we think we are really the Orthodox Christians. Yet, on the general principle of common sense, I keep this term, and by a "Melkite" mean always and only a Catholic of the Byzantine rite in Egypt or Syria.
There is a question, really superfluous, of which we must notice something before we go on to the history of the Melkites — namely, the much vexed one of their ethnological origin. Really there is no question here at all. They are of the same race, of the same mixed blood as all the other inhabitants of these lands, whether Christian or Moslem. The religious body to which a man belongs does not affect his blood; though the Melkites themselves think it does. They protest eagerly that they are Greeks, in the ethnological sense, descended from Greeks of Hellas. At first it seems to the Western reader absurd that anyone should hold this theory, with its obvious confusion between religion and race. No one in England discusses of what blood Methodists may be. But it is the commonest confusion in the East. Its origin is the way the Turks always class people by fictitious races according to their religions. Each religious body is a "nation" (millet) to the Turk. He has some confused idea that the differences of religion in his empire come from the fact that each group is descended from a race which once held that particular religion. Since so much civil law, and the state of each subject in temporal matters, depend on the religious body to which he belongs, it is not so surprising that, at last, the Christians themselves have begun to look upon themselves as different nations, in the ordinary sense. This is encouraged by the fact that it has always been extremely difficult for a man in the Turkish Empire to change his religion. We are so used to seeing people change from one religion to another that it would be impossible for us to confuse religion with race. But out there this hardly ever happens. Each man is, in religion, what his fathers were before him; he marries a woman of the same Church; so something like a distinction of blood often does, at last, occur between the Churches. They think that it is so essentially. They talk of their "nation," meaning their Church, and they do not realize that this is a purely artificial use of the word introduced by the Moslems, because these had no other way of classifying their Christian subjects.
As a matter of fact, the situation is simple enough; it applies
