27. март 2009.

The Soul of Serbia

Lectures delivered before the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham and in London and elsewhere in England

by Father

Nicholas Velimirovic

Professor of Theology at Belgrade


* * *



We have stood up for the small nations; we have recognized their rights and their value. The British Empire is already a federation of friendly nations, and the independence which ever since the mistake about America has been granted to its Colonies has been more than justified.

'We must see to it that a country nearer home is emancipated too, and left free to develop its own genius without mistrust and without coercion. Ireland, by its striking loyalty, as well as by its always conspicuous bravery, has earned its modified independence, and henceforth must be one of the friendly nations in the British Empire.

'Consider what we owe to the small nations - we may almost say that to them is due the progress of the world. In some of the best epochs in history all nations were small; communities which produced some of the greatest of mankind were no more than cities. Value in spiritual things cannot be numerically estimated; nor has numbering the people always been reckoned a judicious act.

'Of high modern examples of small populations Lord Bryce gives the following historical summary:

'In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzwerland, lighting the torch of freedom six hundred years ago, and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European Continent? And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy? So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of science, from Linnaus downwards, poets like Tegner and Bjornson, scholars like Madvig, dauntless explorers like Fridtjof Nansen. England had, in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton, a population little larger than that of Bulgaria today. The United States, in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall, counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece.'

'And the following is by Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield:

'Almost everything which is most precious in our civilization has come from small States - the Old Testament, the Homeric poems, the Attic and the Elizabethan drama, the art of the Italian Renaissance, the common law of England. Nobody needs to be told what humanity owes to Athens, Florence, Geneva, or Weimar. The world's debt to any one of these small States far exceeds all that has issued from the militant monarchies of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, of the present Emperor of Germany... In the particular points of heroic and martial patriotism, civic pride and political prudence, they have often reached the highest level to which it is possible for humanity to attain; and from Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as from the illustrious school of Florentine historians and publicists, the world has learnt nine-tenths of its best political wisdom.'

'But indeed, when considering the possible outcome from small communities, there is no need to go beyond the country now called Syria! And it is interesting to remember that that sufficiently momentous Advent occurred during a numbering of the people by the Emperor of Rome. One more head to be counted - or perhaps to be ignored by the enumerators as too insignificant an item in the stable of an inn; true majesty being only discernible by the extra simple and the extra wise!

'But, returning to more prosaic matters, it is manifest that one of the minor advantages flowing from the existence of smaller States consists in the fact that they serve as convenient laboratories for social experiment on a moderate scale. Much material for the comparative study of social and industrial expedients has been provided by the enterprise of the American State Legislatures. Such experiments as women's suffrage, or as the State control of the public sale of alcoholic drink, or as a thoroughgoing application of the Reformatory theory punishment, would hardly be seriously contemplated in large, old, and settled communities, were it not for the fact that they have been tried upon a smaller scale by the more adventurous Legislatures of the New World.

'The gallantry shown by Serbia is universally recognized; and its future is clearly going to be an important one. It is strange to recall that the present war immediately arose because that country resented a gratuitous attempt, sustained by Prussia and instigated I believe chiefly by Hungary, to destroy it and blot out its independence.' - Sir Oliver Lodge: 'The War and After.' pp. 201-204.



CONTENTS


I
THE SOUL OF SERBIA

II
SERBIA'S PLACE IN HUMAN HISTORY

III
RELIGION AND NATIONALITY IN SERBIA

IV
SERBIA'S TRAGEDY






















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