British Rule and Modern Politics; A Historical Study (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Religious divisions in Christian Europe?Political influence of the Papacy throughout the Christian world?Passive attitude of the Greek Church in political affairs. Though Christian nations became gradually separated in Europe by three chief divisions of the Faith, the most numerous was the Roman Catholic. The Russians alone represented the Greek Church in political power, while Protestantism was established in Great Britain, north-western Europe, and in central Germany. But Christianity itself was never repudiated by any Christian nation except in parts of France for a short time. The subjected Jews scattered among Christian states preserved their hereditary and national unbelief, which they never ventured to vindicate by argument. Their views on Christianity were privately transmitted among successive generations in their own families, but were seldom if ever revealed to the Christian world around them. With modern sceptics or atheists who arose among Christians, they could have nothing in common, as the former rejected the Old Testament as well as the New. The Jews, who gradually passed almost entirely under either Christian or Mohammedan rule, preserved ancestral faith as firmly and as little affected by disastrous politicalhistory as when'it was the established religion of their native king and country. Although religious interests or prejudices long influenced British history, that of the Continent was apparently more actuated by political motives. The joint seizure and permanent partition of Poland, a Catholic kingdom, by Eussians, Prussians, and Austrians, proved decisively that they were quite agreed in political sentiment when acquiring territory without religious design. This extraordinary triumph of might over national right was thus shown to be the...