Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/111

 Rh And alongside this ironical piece of oratory we find the reverse of the medal, in one of the proposals laid by the Sovereign before the conciliable of 1551.

'Monks and nuns take the habit and the veil, not to save their souls, but to spend idle, pleasant lives, wandering hither and thither, and perpetually moving from one village to another in search of amusement. … In all the monasteries monks and abbots drink to excess. … At Moscow and in all the other towns they may be seen sharing their dwellings and their wealth with worldly men and women. … Archimandrites and abbots forsake the common board and hold revel in their own cells with their invited guests. … Women—even loose women—have free access to them; monks and hermits go about the country shamelessly, taking young boys with them. …'

The evil was not confined to the 'black' clergy. In that very conciliable of the year 1551, mention was made of priests who only celebrated Mass every six or seven years, came to church drunk, quarrelled amongst themselves, and said the prayers all wrong. Lasicius (De Russorem … Religione, 1582, p. 210) mentions popes who had been seen lying dead drunk in the public squares, and Herberstein (Commentarii, Startchevski, i. 21) saw priests publicly flogged on this account. Instead of being houses of prayer, the sacred edifices, thus profaned by their own priests, became places of meeting, clubs, markets. Men entered them. even when Mass was going on, without baring their heads, talked and laughed at the top of their voices, discussed and settled their business affairs, and often broke in upon the chanting with coarse words. Though an analogy may be traced between these features and those pointed out by Rabelais, Calvin, and Luther in the religious habits of the West, their testimony cannot detract from the example set and the work performed at that same period, by St. François de Paul and the Benedictines of St. Maur. In Russia, up till the early years of the sixteenth century, at all events, no such counterpoise existed. But at that moment the necessity for amendment forced itself on the best minds within the bosom of the monastic communities themselves. As to ways and means, opinions differed. Ivan Sanine, the son of a Lithuanian deserter—in religion Joseph, called Volotski—who founded the monastery of Volok-Lamskoii (now Volokolamsk) in 1479, thought he had found them in a return to the strict application of the old rule. By education he belonged to the old type of Russian Knijniki, with their utter lack of the critical instinct, and their absolute respect for everything that has been. But this could not suffice for everybody. From the depths of those hermitages, to the appearance and