Thus the Russian reforms spread out in several directions, the Zavolojskiié startsy and the Iosiflianie only differing as to the means to be employed for the reconstruction of the religious edifice, while the sectarians of Artemi's type pursued an altogether revolutionary and destructive work. A political element also intervened in the quarrel. Volotski was conservative even in his conception of the proper relations between Church and State—the State to serve the interests of the Church, and the Church, in return, to yield the State full obedience. According to this organization, the monastery, the material existence of which was based on a privileged land tenure, took on the character of a State institution, the centre and nursery of an ecclesiastical aristocracy, and the triumphant assertion of this doctrine certainly contributed to the establishment of autocratic power at Moscow. The views of the Zavolojskiié startsy on this subject were very different. Nil Sorski put the question aside altogether. It possessed no interest for him, and, from his essentially Christian point of view, had no existence at all. The moral principles he extolled were compatible with every form of political life. But Vassiane Patrikiév was affected in a different way. He could not forget his own origin and parentage, and his patrician soul recoiled from submission to any unlimited and uncontrolled political power. Thus he spent all his personal authority and all the prestige of his party to strengthen an opposition with which Moscow had to wrestle till its professors were crushed under the iron hand of Ivan the Terrible.
All the elements I have indicated had their share in this struggle, and for that reason I have dwelt somewhat fully on their precise nature. The noble seed, the existence of which, in a dim corner of the national history, is revealed to us through the dark and painful fate of some scarce known heroes, was trodden into the soil and drowned in blood by the victory of the official Church and the absolute power. That seed lies in the earth yet, and even now is scarcely rising above the ground. The harvest is still a long way off. But grains of wheat have slumbered in Egyptian tombs for centuries without mouldering away, and it is good to know, it is a consoling thought, that in Russia, too, beneath the dust of centuries, the past has sown such fruitful atoms, which yet bide their time.
I have still to elucidate the conditions under which the great drama to which I have just referred was played out—a drama which will constitute the greater part of the subject of this work—by an evocation of a part of the national life on which the preceding pages have frequently touched, but which must now be more completely sketched.
