Great nations have failed, and in every case it was the government's corruption and neglect of duty that caused the sufferings and failures, of which the political history is too abounding and too accessible to be quoted. We only mention the Greek nation, perhaps the greatest and most illustrious of all nations that ever failed in their political career, because we are well informed and personally acquainted with the details that brought this formerly world-wide respected and valued gem of civilization into insignificance in the eye of the scornful, and a plaything in the hands of the so-called great powers of Europe.
In the year of 1902, while I was a High Priest, Archimandrites, grand representative of the Saint Mary's Monastery, Salamis; Orator and Grand Chaplain of the Supreme Council of Greece; and confessor in the most exclusive societies of Athens, hearing confessions and granting absolutions; the following incident, which is published for the first time, and only in parts that are printable, brought me to a final decision, that I should leave my home, my loved ones, and all the flourishing prospects to be a Bishop, with all the comforts and luxuries attached to a Bishopric, just because I had witnessed a few scenes of the manifold political plots that caused the downfall of my own nation, and my own people scattered to the four corners of the world, wandering, struggling for their existence, while Greece, the land of the Gods, and the home of art and beauty, was left in the hands of a few parasites, strangers and unsympathetic feudals who have shown no mercy in straining every material and spiritual bit from the people that still honors them as their kings and sovereigns.
At the time spoken of, there was an open secret to every well informed Greek that the Queen of Greece, Olga, had been the tool of the Russian bureaucracy, trying by means of religious influences to keep the Greeks under the Russian political control; that the Queen Olga paid the expenses for the education of a monk, who, on his return from Russia, where he was graduated from the theological academies of Kiev and Moskow, became the Queen's personal confessor, and afterwards by the Queen's very earnest and almost scandalous activities that monk was raised to the Metropolitan Throne of Athens, which position placed him at the head of the Greek Church, and made him the President of the Holy Synod of Greece.