The Egyptian and Syrian Churches, therefore, were destined to labour
not for themselves, but for us. The signs of disease and
decrepitude were already but too manifest in them. That very
peculiar turn of the Graeco-Eastern mind, which made them the great
thinkers of the then world, had the effect of drawing them away from
practice to speculation; and the races of Egypt and Syria were
effeminate, over-civilised, exhausted by centuries during which no
infusion of fresh blood had come to renew the stock. Morbid, self-
conscious, physically indolent, incapable then, as now, of personal
or political freedom, they afforded material out of which fanatics
might easily be made, but not citizens of the kingdom of God. The
very ideas of family and national life-those two divine roots of the
Church, severed from which she is certain to wither away into that
most godless and most cruel of spectres, a religious world-had
perished in the East from the evil influence of the universal
practice of slaveholding, as well as from the degradation of that
Jewish nation whichhad been for ages the great witness for those
ideas; and all classes, like their forefather Adam--like, indeed,
'the old Adam' in every man and in every age--were shifting the
blame of sin from their own consciences to human relationships and
duties--and therein, to the God who had appointed them; and saying
as of old, '_The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me
of the tree, and I did eat._' The passionate Eastern character,
like all weak ones, found total abstinence easier than temperance,
religious thought more pleasant than godly action; and a monastic
world grew up all over the East, of such vastness that in Egypt it
was said to rival in numbers the lay population, producing, with an
enormous decrease in the actual amount of moral evil, an equally
great enervation and decrease of the population. Such a people
could offer no resistance to the steadily-increasing tyranny of the