oice spirits, of rough, jovial
temperament; and of another who, having neglected to take off his hat as
he passed the proprietor's house, was put into a barrel and rolled down
a hill into the river at the bottom!

In citing these incidents, I do not at all mean to imply that they
represent the relations which usually existed between proprietors and
village priests, for I am quite aware that wanton cruelty was not among
the ordinary vices of Russian serf-owners. My object in mentioning the
incidents is to show how a brutal proprietor--and it must be admitted
that they were not a few brutal individuals in the class--could maltreat
a priest without much danger of being called to account for his conduct.
Of course such conduct was an offence in the eyes of the criminal law;
but the criminal law of that time was very shortsighted, and strongly
disposed to close its eyes completely when the offender was an
influential proprietor. Had the incidents reached the ears of the
Emperor Nicholas he would probably have ordered the culprit to be
summarily and severely punished but, as the Russian proverb has it,
"Heaven is high, and the Tsar is far off." A village priest treated in
this barbarous way could have little hope of redress, and, if he were
a prudent man, he would make no attempt to obtain it; for any annoyance
which he might give the proprietor by complaining to the ecclesiastical
authorities would be sure to be paid back to him with interest in some
indirect way.

The sons of the clergy who did not succeed in finding regular sacerdotal
employment were in a still worse position. Many of them served as
scribes or subordinate officials in the public offices, where they
commonly eked out their scanty salaries by unblushing extortion and
pilfering. Those who did not succeed in gaining even modest employment
of this kind had to keep off starvation by less lawful means, and not
unfrequently found their way into the prisons or to Siberia.

In judging of the Russian priesthood of the present time, we must call
to mind this severe school through which it has passed, and we must
also take into consideration the spirit which has been for centuries
predominant in the Eastern Church--I mean the strong tendency both in
the clergy and in the laity to attribute an inordinate importance to
the ceremonial element of religion. Primitive mankind is everywhere and
always disposed to regard religion as simply a mass of mysterious rites
which h