58 ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF 1853 chap, plislied Russian who might be travelling in foreign • countries used to receive instructions of some kind from his Government, and was enabled to believe that, either by collecting information or in some still more important way, he was performing a duty towards the State. Men thus entrusted became eager partakers of a policy rather more enterprising than the policy avowed by their Government, and the result was that the natural ambition of the country was always being nur- tured and subserved by a great Aristocracy. But, moreover, the ambition of the Statesmen and the Nobles was reinforced by the pious desire of the humbler classes. Some fifty millions of men in Russia held one creed ; and they held it, too, with the earnestness of which Western Europe used to have experience in earlier times, in her wars Russia had always been engaged against na- tions which were not of her faith ; and twice at least in the very agony of her national life, and when all other hope was gone, she had been rescued by the warlike zeal of her priesthood. V>y these causes love of country and devotion to the Church had become so closely welded into one engrossing sentiment, that good Muscovites could not sever the one idea from the other;* and although they were by nature a kind and good-humoured race of men, they were fierce in the matter of their religion. They had heard of
- I owe my perception of the causes winch rendered the
Russian Church so intensely national to Arthur Stanley's most interesting work upon the Greek Church.
