briad_) is indeed one of the characteristics of the inhabitant
of Greater Russia. The way in which Russia was converted to Christianity
has much to do with this. The mass of the people became Christians at
the bidding of others, and with no sufficient preparatory instruction,
without even having passed through all the stages of that polytheistic
evolution from which other nations of Europe had emerged before their
adoption of Christianity. The religion of the gospel was, in its highest
statement, too far advanced for the mental and social condition of the
people; and so it was corrupted, or rather reduced to external forms.
Russia adopted merely the outside of Christianity; and there, even more
strictly than in the West, it is true that the peasant was still a
heathen. Other nations have adopted the outside of a religion, and have
afterward absorbed its spirit: from its geographical and historical
remoteness such an absorption was hard for Russia to achieve. It was
separated from the centres of the Christian world by distance and by
Mongol rule: its religion, like everything else, was debased by poverty
and ignorance. Theology, properly speaking, utterly vanished, and its
place was taken by ceremonial, which thus became the whole of religion.
Amidst the general degradation a knowledge of the words and rites of
public worship was all that could be exacted of a clergy which did not
always know how to read.

The changes which had taken place in the traditional texts and ritual
have little solid ground for the popular devotion entertained for them.
The liturgy was corrupted by the superstitious veneration paid it by the
ignorant. False readings had crept into the books which contained the
various local "uses," to borrow a term from the Anglican terminology.
Liturgical unity had imperceptibly disappeared amidst various readings
and discordant ceremonies. In course of transcription absurdities had
slipped into the missals, along with grotesque additions and arbitrary
intercalations, while the new readings were received with the respect
due to antiquity, and these sometimes unintelligible passages acquired a
sanctity in direct proportion to their obscurity. The devout mind found
in them mysteries and occult meanings. On such perverted texts were
erected theories and systems which pious fraud from time to time
expanded into treatises attributed to the Fathers of the Church. So wild
was the confusion, and so palpable the alterati