two always appear before them in perfect harmony. But this is a homage to the strength of popular ecclesiastical prejudices. The Government courts the people through the Church, and respects, with scrupulous care, the whole existing ecclesiastical image in the popular mind. No despotism is really quite despotic. The mass is strong where it has a feeling, though its strength is kept latent by being skilfully yielded to. So delicate is the Russian Government of any interference with the religious prejudices of the people, that, to this day, the old style continues in Russia. No Cabinet has dared to introduce the new one, from apprehension of a popular insurrection. The people would find their religious festivals interfered with, and would see the fact, and not understand the explanation.

The relations of Church and State may be gathered from these facts. The Church is strong in the affections of the mass, and is pre-eminently a popular Church. She rests upon the people. She and the people together constitute the old element of mind and feeling in Russia. They are on one side; the Government, on the other, without any of the old religious spirit, bends from its utilitarian basis to the popular devotion. The Church, moreover, wholly as she is without political power, does not provoke its jealousy. Her bishoprics are not places of secular rank and emolument; she has no posts that attract the covetous eye of the world, and make her patronage an object of contest and division. She is consequently not much interfered with, and she has her own way, for the most part, upon her own field. She manages her own internal affairs for herself; and the creation of new dioceses, or new schools, the censorship of the divinity press, education, and the like, are left in her hands. The Bishops are spiritual lords in their own dioceses, subject to the Holy Governing Synod.' The Holy Governing Synod' meets and deliberates. The President, the senior Bishop, sits at the head of the table, with his deacon behind him. In one corner of the room are the clerks of the Synod, in another the clerks of the Emperor. If the Emperor has any recommendation to make with respect to any Church arrangement, his clerk leaves his desk, when he hears the subject entered upon at the table, and goes up to the President's chair. The Synod nominates the Bishops, sending two names to the Emperor to choose from. If the Emperor has any one whom he wants to promote, he suggests his name beforehand; but the Government does not commonly interfere with the Episcopal appointments. So long, in short, as the Church goes on on her present basis, she has, and is likely to have, as much liberty as she wants to carry out that basis. There is a prevalent mistake as to the relations of the Church in Russia to the State. She is prevented from rising, from getting power;

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but she is not interfered with where she is. An eye is upon her, that would note the first attempt at a return to her mediæval power; a powerful arm would crush the first appearance of a Becket or a Hildebrand in her. A strong prospective check is kept upon her; but the check is a prospective rather than a present one. A check is a burden and a pressure, doubtless; but a check is one sort of burden; actual interference is another. The State is powerful; the Church is weak. This is the pressure upon her.

The Church thus still presents, in her large and popular aspect, an old, rough, simple ecclesiastical genius and temper. She puts thronged areas, and faithful poor, splendid pomp and ceremonials, ascetic monks and prelates, and bowing, kissing, kneeling multitudes before us. She exhibits the faults and virtues of olden times. We have alluded to the old church character of the people especially. We go down the streets of Moscow, and know a Bishop from the groups that kneel and cluster about him as he walks. In a Church ceremonial, where the Bishop takes part, you observe, on the Bishop's entrance, a regular hum of pleasure and satisfaction; a buzzing, as of bees, pervading the whole crowd, as it presses upon him. They join vigorously in the Church services, and enjoy the sound of their own voices. They abound in devotional signs, gesticulations, prostrations. They fall upon the church floor, and knock the ground with their foreheads. They give way to their devout feeling, as different parts of the service strike home to them, or recall some recollection, joyful or penitential; and there is much nature and freedom in a congregation. One man does not do exactly like another, and the harmony of the scene is not interfered with by individual motions, and a variating thermometer, and little waves and eddies of feeling. A person asked why all the Saints' days in the calendar were not kept; the answer was, that if they were, the whole population of the country would certainly be all the morning in church; for as soon as they heard the bells going, nothing could keep them in the fields. They are rigorous observers of the Church fasts, which extend over a considerable portion of the year with them, comprehending not only Lent and Advent, but a Midsummer fast also. A religious poor man feels a call, and enters into a monastery; and a serf applies to his master for liberty, that he may follow the religious life. The plea is admitted. An Englishman was struck by the religious air of a Russian servant in an English hotel at St. Petersburgh; he seemed superior to his profession: Ah,' said the landlady, 'I am afraid he is going to turn Methodist. We shall never keep him. He will be going into a monastery soon.' The people have their places of pilgrimage, shrines, and tombs of saints, to which

they periodically go; the pilgrimage to Jerusalem is popular. These visits are accompanied, in the case of the better sort, with prayer and confession, and the monks of the place receive the penitents. The parish priest is ordinarily the confessor; but, as in the Western Church, people may choose their own; and the monk is often preferred. When a person of higher rank enters a monastery, he has this duty to perform often to those of his rank out of doors, and has a spiritual occupation thus provided

for him.

One, and one only, main sect at present exists in Russia; and it is one most characteristic of the ecclesiastical character of the people. The sect that Nikon's reforms in the Church-books shot off from the Church still goes on, and uses obstinately the old Russian service-books, as they stood before the correction. The greater part have no point of disagreement with the Church except that; they are harmless ceremonialist fanatics, and only show the popular taste of the Church in a ridiculous, eccentric, and perverted shape. They are not allowed to print their service-books; and they transcribe them with immense labour for the use of their churches. This sect has split up since its rise its different divisions amount to about three millions; an extraordinary number to collect on such an absurd basis. But its numbers are daily diminishing, and it will die a natural death, probably, in course of time.

The Russian Bishops are plain, hard, ascetic men. They come out of the monastic body, and have thus undergone a preparatory discipline, which puts their office in no enviable light to the man of the world, and makes them stand out as an order and phalanx to the popular eye. They reside in the monasteries, of which they are the Abbots or Archimandrites; a few plain apartments, and a frugal monastic table, supply the necessities of themselves and their suites; they live surrounded by bare walls and black monks; and the Church services, and the chanting of the choir, are their chief recreation from the hard work, the correspondence, the interviews, the cares and projects of a diocese.

The monasteries were much reduced in number at the time of the great spoliation; but about half are left. There are now three hundred and eighty-four monasteries, and a hundred and eight nunneries. The three Lavras have each a hundred monks; in the rest, the number varies from twenty or thirty, to forty. Some of these have been founded since the great spoliation, by individual munificence, and have revenues of their own, not paid from the State. The piety of the rich takes a fancy to particular monasteries occasionally, to which an ancestral connexion, or some other motive, attaches them; and one noble benefactress has recently bestowed between one and two millions of roubles, in the shape of endowments and repairs, upon one of the

monasteries at Novogorod. Another has refounded an old monastery in the North, that the revolution destroyed. The scene of the early conversions, the rude monastic site, that, in the dawn of Russian Christianity, sent out its monks to the barbarous tribes of the North; the mountain top, which the monks fled to and excavated in the time of the Tartars, still appeals to the devotional mind; and the same holy spot is chosen for occupation again. In spite of assistance, however, the spare allowance from the State, given in commutation for the seized lands, reduced since to nearly one-third of its value by the depreciation of money, left many of the monasteries, within the last twelve years, in such a state, that they could not go on. The inmates were positively starving. The Police-Bureau, taking a plain magisterial view of the case, stimulated by a compassion which cost nothing, and not being versed in the canons, procured an Imperial Ukase, settling the difficulty in a very summary way. The inmates that had not positively taken the vows were set at liberty, and told to return to their homes, and earn their livelihood. But the Metropolitan Seraphim, President of the Synod, explained to the Emperor, in an interview, that though the expedient was very congenial with police law, it was not with the canons; that the monasteries could not expel inmates during their novitiate, if they chose to stay; and that the Church considered them her own. Ukase was in consequence of this remonstrance revoked, and the State applied a more canonical and more charitable remedy to the evil, in the shape of an increased allowance to the poor monks and nuns.

The

The monasteries perform two duties to the Church; they keep up the monastic life, and clerical training. They are refuges of devotion, and also schools for the Church. They have two classes of inmates to correspond; those who are there simply for the life devotional, and those who take part in the school, or seminary, where such appendages are attached. The services in the monasteries commence at four in the morning; matins begin then, and last till seven. The monks then retire till liturgy, or mass, which begins at ten, and lasts two hours. They then take their first and only regular meal, dinner, during which a religious book is read out. They sleep for an hour, and then it is time for vespers. Some tea, or a crust of bread, is taken by a monk, if he likes, in the evening. Reading, or manual labour, or private devotion, supplies the vacant hours. The services in the larger monasteries are most beautiful and impressive. Singing is an article of education in them; and the alternate choirs of thirty or forty monks on each side take up one another quickly, and their deep musical Russian voices roll like the rich notes of an organ down the nave. The monks come principally out of the lower orders of society; but, occasionally,

a person of rank or wealth enters the religious life. A friend of ours met, in St. Petersburgh, a monk, come to beg alms for his convent, in the same way in which monks did ages ago. He was the only son of a wealthy Russian merchant, and the heir of a large fortune; and he had bright and glowing prospects before him, when he resolved suddenly to quit the world, and become monk. With all the habits that a polite education had formed, he entered a monastery, and went through the menial offices, working in the kitchen and outhouses of the establishment, as the inferior servant-monks do. His Superior paid him no attentions above the rest, and let him go on purposely unnoticed, as a discipline to his humility, and to prevent him thinking he had done any great thing in becoming a monk. At the end of many years, he asked leave to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When he came back, his Superior's remark was, 'Well, so you have 'taken your pleasure;' and the monk returned to his labours and cell again.

The education of the clergy is appended to the monasteries. Every diocese has its seminary, which is put within monastic walls, and conducted by members of the fraternity. Besides these provincial institutions, are four great central metropolitan ones; the spiritual academies of Moscow, Kieff, St. Petersburgh, and Kazan, which receive the promising pupils of the subordinate seminaries, and carry on their education. The spiritual academies supply the learned and scholastic and influential part of the Russian clergy, the Principals and Vice-principals of seminaries, and the higher parochial clergy; they educate the rising race of Bishops and Archimandrites, and other dignitaries. The course of reading there is much the same with that in our own schools and universities. The Greek and Latin poets and historians accompany the line of divinity-reading; and some knowledge of Hebrew is given.

Some of the missionary enterprises of the Russian Church still breathe her old spirit, and have the primitive air of her northern conversions about them. The missions on the borders of the Yénicei, that the Archimandrite Macarius has been carrying on for the last fifteen years; the rapid conversion of the Samoïedes on the Karsco Sea, and the missions to various districts of the Caucasus, show a zeal for the spread of the Gospel, which, we may hope, would swell to its old northern expanse again, if it had the old North to convert once more. But the most interesting missionary achievement of recent years, has been that of Bishop Innocent, in the Aleeutian and Curille islands, south of Kamschatka, in the North Pacific.

At the close of the last century a Russian merchant-traveller came back to his country, with a description of various pagan islands and tribes in these remote parts, that called for con