who has done more
than any other man to bring the truth home to us, "is not a land of
bomb-throwers, is not a land of intolerable tyranny and unhappiness, of
a languishing and decayed peasantry, of a corrupt and ugly church; the
Russians are an agricultural nation, bred to the soil, illiterate as the
savages, and having as yet no ambition to live in the towns; they are as
strong as giants, simple as children, mystically superstitious by reason
of their unexplained mystery." Russia is in fact 145 million
peasants--ploughing and praying. And here once again one is reminded of the
Middle Ages. Cross the Russian frontier and you enter the mediaeval world.
Miracles are believed in, holy men are revered as saints, thousands of
pilgrims journey on foot every year to Jerusalem, which is to every true
believer the centre of the universe and therefore becomes at Easter almost
a Russian city. Russia is the most Christian country in the world, and her
people are the most Christ-like. The turbulence and violence, so contrary
to the Christian spirit, which was an inseparable feature of mediaeval
feudalism is absent from Russia; and the gospel of non-resistance, of
brotherly love, of patience under affliction, of pity and mercy, which
Tolstoi preached so eloquently to the world at large, he learnt from
two teachers--the peasant of modern Russia and the Peasant of ancient
Palestine, who was crucified upon the Cross.

Yet it is a mistake to talk, as some do, of the power of the Russian
Church, or of "priestcraft." The Church has little political power or
social prestige. It is the power of religion, not that of ecclesiastical
institutions, which is the arresting fact about modern Russia. It is not
so much that Russia has a church, as that she _is_ a church. In England
we have narrowed religion down to one day of the week and shut it up in
special buildings which we call churches; in Russia it is impossible to
avoid religion. As you pass out of the gangway of the ticket-office at the
railway station, you find yourself in front of a sacred picture with a
lamp burning continually before it, and you are expected to utter a prayer
before beginning your journey. Every room in Russia has its _eikon_--is in
fact a chapel, every enterprise is sanctified by prayer and ceremony. All
English travellers in Russia have acknowledged this profound national sense
of religion, and contrasted it with the religious formalism of the West.
"Italy," wrote Mr.