In the East it is Roman Catholicism that stands for much that we associate with Protestantism.
It is Roman Catholicism that is by comparison plain and practical and scornful of superstition and concerned for social work.
It is Greek Catholicism that is stiff with gold and gorgeous with ceremonial, with its hold on ancient history and its inheritance of imperial tradition.

In the cant of our own society, we may say it is the Roman who rationalises and the Greek who Romanises.
It is the Roman Catholic who is impatient with Russian and Greek childishness, and perpetually appealing for common sense.
It is the Greek who defends such childishness as childlike faith and would rebuke such common sense as common scepticism.

I do not speak of the theological tenets or even the deeper emotions involved, but only, as I have said, of contrasts visible even in the street.
And the whole difference is sufficiently suggested in two phrases I heard within a few days.

A distinguished Anglo-Catholic, who has himself much sympathy with the Greek Orthodox traditions, said to me, "After all, the Romans were the first Puritans." And I heard that a Franciscan, being told that this Englishman and perhaps the English generally were disposed to make an alliance with the Greek Church, had only said by way of comment, "And a good thing too, the Greeks might do something at last." Anyhow the first impression is that the Greek is more gorgeous in black than the Roman in colours.

But the Greek of course can also appear in colours, especially in those eternal forms of frozen yet fiery colours which we call jewels.
I have seen the Greek Patriarch, that magnificent old gentleman, walking down the street like an emperor in the _Arabian Nights_, hung all over with historic jewels as thick as beads or buttons, with a gigantic cross of solid emeralds that might have been given him by the green genii of the sea, if any of the genii are Christians.
These things are toys, but I am entirely in favour of toys; and rubies and emeralds are almost as intoxicating as that sort of lustrous coloured paper they put inside Christmas crackers.
This beauty has been best achieved in the North in the glory of coloured glass; and I have seen great Gothic windows in which one could really believe that the robes of martyrs were giant rubies or the starry sky a single enormous sapphire.
But the colours of the West are transparent, the colours of the East opaque.