This example of the island primates was to a certain extent followed by their brethren on the main-land. There had sprung into existence, in the last month or so, two great powers in Greece, the army and the church, still in that time the mistress of men's souls; and the primates, who before the Turkish supremacy had been temporal as well as spiritual princes, wished to see themselves reinstated in the positions they had held. Many of them too, such as Germanos, at Patras, had worked with a true and simple purpose for the liberation of their country; and now that the people were beginning to reap the fruits of their labors, they looked to receive their due, and their demands, on the whole, were just. But never were demands made at so unseasonable an opportunity, for while the military leaders shrugged their shoulders, saying "This is our work as yet," they obtained but a divided allegiance, for the people were devoted to their church. The result was a most unhappy distrust and suspicion between the two parties. The primates openly said that the object of the military leaders was their own aggrandizement to the detriment of other interests, the military leaders that their reverend friends were interfering in concerns outside of their province. Even greater complications ensued when the primates themselves, as in the case of Germanos, were men who fought with earthly weapons, and he, taking strongly the side of the church as against the army, was the cause of much seditious feeling.
The personal ascendency of Petrobey and Nicholas was a large mitigation of these evils in the army at Tripoli, but both felt that their position was unsettled, depending only on popular favor, and matters came to a crisis when Germanos himself came to the camp from Patras with an armed following. To do the man justice, it was jealousy for the church, not the personal greed of power, which inspired him; as a prince of that body and a vicar of Christ, he had invested himself with the insignia of his position. But it was the royalty of his Master and not His humility which he would fain represent, and if he had remembered the entry of One into His chosen city, meek and sitting upon an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass, his heart would have been better turned to the spirit of the King of kings.