pathy with the poor, oppressed, and despised peasantry. So long as the Emperor Nicholas lived they had to confine themselves to a purely literary activity; but at the commencement of the present reign they were enabled to descend into the arena of practical politics, and played a most useful and honourable part in the emancipation of the serfs. Of this I shall have occasion to speak hereafter. In the new local self-government, too-the Zemstvo and the new municipal institutionsthey have laboured energetically and to good purpose.

But what of their Panslavistic aspirations? This is a subject which has at present a special interest, but on which there is not much to be said. By their theory they were constrained to pay attention to the Slav race as a whole, but they were more Russian than Slav, and more Moscovite than Russian. The Panslavistic element has consequently always occupied a secondary place in Slavophil doctrine. Though they have done much to stimulate popular sympathy with the South Slavonic tribes, and have always cherished the hope that these tribes would one day throw off the bondage of the German and the Turk, they have never proposed any elaborate project for the solution of the Eastern Question. So far as I was able to gather from their conversation, they seemed to favour the idea of a grand Slavonic Confederation, in which the hegemony would of course belong to Russia. In ordinary times the only steps which they took for the realisation of this idea consisted in contributing money for schools and churches among the Slav population of Austria and Turkey, and

in educating young Bulgarians in Russia. During the Cretan insurrection they sympathised warmly with the insurgents as co-religionists, but since that time their Hellenic sympathies have greatly diminished, because the Greeks have shown in various ways that they have political aspirations inconsistent with Panslavism, and that they are likely to become the rivals rather than the allies of the Slavs. In the present movement the Slavophils have been most active and energetic in sending assistance of all kinds to the Servians.

The Press of Western Europe commonly confounds the Slavophils with the party which is represented by the Moscow Gazette and its editor, M. Katkoff. In reality the two are by no means identical. The Moscow Gazette has no peculiar love of ancient Russia, is no admirer of the rural commune, sympathises with the landed proprietors rather than with the peasants, regards all questions from the political rather than the ethnological or religious point of view, belongs to the orthodox school of political economists, and advocates the principles of free trade. In these and other respects it differs decidedly from the Slavophils. But the two agree in one respect, and this, perhaps, excuses the habit of confounding them as soon as political complications arise, they both become violently patriotic and bellicose.*

* In this chapter as elsewhere I have used the word Muscovite in the sense of "pertaining to the Tsardom of Muscovy," and Moscovite in the sense of "pertaining to the town of Moscow."

CHAPTER XXVII.

CHURCH AND STATE.

St. Petersburg and Moscow-Russia Outside of the Medieval Papal Commonwealth-Influence of the Greek Church-Ecclesiastical History of RussiaRelations between Church and State-Eastern Orthodoxy and the Russian National Church-The Synod--Ecclesiastical Grumbling-Local Ecclesiastical Administration -The Black Clergy and the Monasteries-The Character of the Eastern Church reflected in the History of Religious ArtPractical Consequences-The Union Scheme.

HAVING often heard that the Russians were an intensely religious people, I was somewhat surprised to find, during my first sojourn in St. Petersburg, that those with whom I came in contact seemed singularly indifferent to religious matters. Though uncompromising adherents of the Greek Orthodox Church and accustomed to observe to a certain extent its rites and ceremonies, they appeared to be free alike from deep religious feeling and from shallow religious cant. Some friends to whom I communicated this impression endeavoured to explain it by reminding me that St. Petersburg was a cosmopolitan rather than a Russian city, and assured me that I should find the genuine Russian spirit in the inhabitants of Moscow.

My subsequent prolonged acquaintance with the Moscovites tended to confirm rather than dispel the impression received in St. Petersburg, and fully convinced me that the Russian educated classes, though warmly attached to their Church, are in general not

at all "religious" in the sense in which we commonly use the word. I found, however, in the ancient capital, especially among those who were more or less tinged with Slavophil sentiment, a certain number of persons who evidently took a deep interest in ecclesiastical affairs. They assured me that Orthodoxy was one of the most essential elements of Russian nationality, and that I could not possibly understand the past history and present condition of Russia without knowing the past history and actual condition of the National Church. Though this statement seemed to me a little too strong, I considered it advisable to devote some attention to the subject, and I propose now to present to the reader a few of the more important results of my studies in that field.

If the Popes did not succeed in realising their grand design of creating a vast European empire based on theocratic principles, they succeeded at least in inspiring with a feeling of brotherhood and a vague consciousness of common interest all the nations which acknowledged their spiritual supremacy. These nations, whilst remaining politically independent and frequently coming into hostile contact with each other, all looked to Rome as the capital of the Christian world, and to the Pope as the highest terrestrial authority. Though the Church did not annihilate nationality, it made a wide breach in the political barriers, and formed a channel for international communication, by which the social and intellectual progress of each nation became known to all the other members of

the great Christian confederacy. Throughout the length and breadth of the Papal Commonwealth, educated men had a common language, a common literature, a common scientific method, and to a certain extent a common jurisprudence. Western Christendom was thus not merely an abstract conception or a geographical expression; if not a political, it was at least a religious and intellectual, unit.

For centuries Russia stood outside of this religious and intellectual confederation, for her Church connected her not with Rome but with Constantinople, and Papal Europe looked upon her as belonging to the barbarous East. When the Tartar hosts swept over her plains, burnt her towns and villages, and finally incorporated her into the Great Mongol Empire, the so-called Christian world took no interest in the struggle except in so far as its own safety was threatened. And as time wore on, the barriers which separated the two great sections of Christendom became more and more formidable. The aggressive pretensions and ambitious schemes of the Vatican produced in the Greek Orthodox world a profound antipathy to the Roman Catholic Church and to Western influence of every kind. So strong was this aversion, that when the nations of the West awakened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from their intellectual lethargy and began to move forward on the path of intellectual and material progress, Russia not only remained unmoved, but looked on the new civilisation with suspicion and fear as a thing heretical and accursed. We have here