has been brought to St. Petersburg and made a member of the Synod merely to append his signature to official papers and to give his consent to foregone conclusions, his displeasure is directed, not against the Emperor, but against the Procureur.  He is full of loyalty and devotion to the Tsar, and has no desire to see his Majesty excluded from all influence in ecclesiastical affairs; but he feels saddened and humiliated when he finds that the whole government of the Church is in the hands of a lay functionary, who may be a military man, and who looks at all matters from a layman’s point of view.

This close connection between Church and State and the thoroughly national character of the Russian Church is well illustrated by the history of the local ecclesiastical administration.  The civil and the ecclesiastical administration have always had the same character and have always been modified by the same influences.  The terrorism which was largely used by the Muscovite Tsars and brought to a climax by Peter the Great appeared equally in both.  In the episcopal circulars, as in the Imperial ukazes, we find frequent mention of “most cruel corporal punishment,” “cruel punishment with whips, so that the delinquent and others may not acquire the habit of practising such insolence,” and much more of the same kind.  And these terribly severe measures were sometimes directed against very venial offences.  The Bishop of Vologda, for instance, in 1748 decrees “cruel corporal punishment” against priests who wear coarse and ragged clothes,* and the records of the Consistorial courts contain abundant proof that such decrees were rigorously executed.  When Catherine II. introduced a more humane spirit into the civil administration, corporal punishment was at once abolished in the Consistorial courts, and the procedure was modified according to the accepted maxims of civil jurisprudence.  But I must not weary the reader with tiresome historical details.  Suffice it to say that, from the time of Peter the Great downwards, the character of all the more energetic sovereigns is reflected in the history of the ecclesiastical administration.

     * Znamenski, “Prikhodskoe Dukhovenstvo v Rossii so vremeni
     reformy Petra,” Kazan, 1873.

Each province, or “government,” forms a diocese, and the bishop, like the civil governor, has a Council which theoretically controls his power, but practically has no controlling influence whatever.  The Consistorial Council, which has in the theory of ecclesiastical procedure a very imposing appearance, is in reality the bishop’s chancellerie, and its members are little more than secretaries, whose chief object is to make themselves agreeable to their superior.  And it must be confessed that, so long as they remain what they are, the less power they possess the better it will be for those who have the misfortune to be under their jurisdiction.  The higher dignitaries have at least larger aims and a certain consciousness of the dignity of their position; but the lower officials, who have no such healthy restraints and receive ridiculously small salaries, grossly misuse the little authority which they possess, and habitually pilfer and extort in the most shameless manner.  The Consistories are, in fact, what the public offices were in the time of Nicholas I.