ation amongst her clergy, offended the religious prejudices
of his subjects by an open disregard of the ordinances of that church, and
his projects of violent reforms. He not only did away with all the fasts
at his court, but he wished to abolish them throughout all his empire, to
remove the images and candles from the churches, and, finally, that the
clergy should shave their beards and dress like the Lutheran pastors. He
also confiscated the landed property of the church. Catherine II., who
observed with the greatest diligence those religious rites which her
husband treated with such contempt, and who greatly owed to this conduct
her elevation to the throne, confirmed, however, the confiscation of the
church estates, assigning salaries to the clergy and convents who had been
supported by that property. She made use of the influence of the
Graeco-Russian Church for the promotion of her political schemes in Poland
and in Turkey; yet, as her religious opinions were those of the school of
Voltaire and Diderot, which believed that Christianity would soon cease to
have any hold upon the human mind, she seems not to have been fully aware
of that immense increase of power at home and influence abroad which a
skilful action upon the religious feelings of the followers of that church
may give to the Russian monarchs. This policy has been formed into a
complete system by the present Emperor, and it was in consequence of it
that several millions of the inhabitants of the ancient Polish provinces,
who belonged to the Greek United Church, _i.e._, who had acknowledged the
supremacy of the Pope by accepting the union concluded at Florence in
1438, were forced to give up that union, and to pass from the spiritual
dominion of the Pope to that of the Czar. This wholesale conversion was
necessarily accompanied with a good deal of persecution. Those clergymen
who had refused to adopt the imperial ukase for their rule of conscience
were banished to Siberia, and many other acts of oppression were committed
on that occasion, but of which only the case of the nuns of Minsk has
produced a sensation in western Europe. The same system of religious
centralization has also been applied to the Protestant peasantry of the
Baltic provinces, many of whom were seduced by various means to join the
Russian Church; and this policy continues to be vigorously prosecuted in
the same quarter, as may be seen by the following extract from the _Berlin
Gazette_ of V