es perpetual change, in
either case of "getting on" somewhere, somehow, we know not where or how;
our very universe, from which we have carefully excluded the supernatural,
has become a development machine, a huge spinning-mill, and our religion,
if we have one, a matter of "progressive revelation." We look before and
after, forwards to some dim utopia, backwards to some ape-like ancestor who
links us with the animal world. Our outlook is horizontal, the mediaeval
outlook perpendicular. The mediaeval man looked upward and downward, to
heaven and hell, when he thought of the future, to sun and cloud, land
and crops, when he thought of the present. He lived in the presence of
perpetual miracle, the daily miracle of sunrise, sunset, and shower; and in
the constant faith in resurrection, whether of the corn which he sowed in
the furrow or of his body which his friends would reverently sow in that
deeper furrow, the grave. And his life was as simple and static as his
universe; the seasons determined his labours, the Church his holidays.
Books did not disturb his faith in the unseen world, for he was illiterate;
nor the lust of gold his contentment with his existence, for commerce was
still confined to a few towns. Russia to-day is in spirit what Europe was
in the Middle Ages.[1] The revolutionaries offered her Western civilisation
and Western philosophy, and she rejected the gift with horror.

[Footnote 1: This, of course, by no means implies that she is _behind_ the
West, or that she is of necessity bound to pass through the same process of
development. The problem of modern Russia is not to imitate the West but
to discover some way of coming to terms with Western ideals without
surrendering her own.]

Will she continue to maintain this attitude? "The Russian peasant," says
Mr. Maurice Baring, "as long as he tills the ground will never abandon his
religion or the observance of it.... Because the religion of the peasant is
the working hypothesis taught him by life; and by his observance of it he
follows what he conceives to be the dictates of common sense consecrated by
immemorial custom." The crucial point of this passage is the conditional
clause: "as long as he tills the ground." Of course, Russia, the granary of
Europe, must always be predominantly an agricultural country; yet she is at
the present moment threatened in many parts with an Industrial Revolution,
the ultimate effects of which may prove far more subversive th