Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/176

 152 Sovereign's leave. Although she laid great stress on the value of the service she already paid by furnishing a certain number of military recruits and contributing to the repair of the fortifications of certain towns, the Church was forced to accept fresh burdens. She had to pay her share towards a fund for ransoming prisoners, and the concessions she made led on to others. In 1573 a conciliable was absolutely to forbid, by the Tsar's order, any donatlonsdonations [sic] of freehold land to the rich monasteries, already well provided in this respect; and another, held in 1580, was to apply the principle still further, by forbidding all future acquisition of any lands whatsoever by any member of either clergy, whether by gift or purchase.

Thus the growth of the landed property of the Church was checked.

In 1551 Ivan sought to give more complete satisfaction to the ideas of the reformers in another matter. His intentions were made manifest in a series of questions addressed to the assembly, so sharp and searching that they sound like an echo of the English 'Black Book' of 1534—that accusation drawn up by the agents of Thomas Cromwell against the monks of his day, their dubious morals, their pride, their coarseness—or else of the scandalous tales which enlivened Layton's correspondence with his master. This somewhat insulting interrogatory, the answers given by the assembly, and the Sovereign’s further remarks, enter into the composition of the 'Book of the Hundred Chapters' (Stoglav), and constitute the most essential portion of it. The dialogue we are thus enabled to follow is most curious. We observe that the sobor at first tried every means of avoiding the discussion. In the first forty chapters, the Tsar's indiscreet queries are all brought together. Then follows a general reply, which altogether begs the question, slipping into side issues, and stealing away into the uncertain regions of the gui pro quo. Ivan finds sharp fault with the bad use made of the wealth piled up in the monasteries. The assembly pretends it does not know what he means, and replies by putting forward divers liturgical problems. This part of the book most likely adheres to the order and procedure first adopted in the debate. After the forty-first chapter these are altered, probably because the Tsar thought a change of method advisable. Questions and answers now follow in regular alternation, though the fathers of the Church still do their best to quibble and avoid any too definite response. A return is made, but with no better success, to some of the points already discussed. When the morals of the clergy are called in question, the sobor, not without a touch of spite, drops into lamentations over the increase of sodomy amongst the laity, and solemnly passes.on to some such problem of ascetic morality as this: Can a sick nun make her confession