Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/177

 Rh to a member of the secular clergy? Sometimes the dialogue warms into a quarrel, and descends to personalities. Ivan has made a remark as to the bad painting of the ikons. The sobor replies, 'Look at what is going on in the Kremlin!' This is a hit at an ikon of doubtful orthodoxy lately substituted for a famous one painted by Roublev, a fifteenth-century artist. Thus, through it all, amidst all the shuffling and straying hither and thither, the general idea of the reform is lost—evaporates, as it were, never attains solidity on any point. Some few amendments as to details: the institution of ecclesiastical starosts and tithing-men to overlook the morals of the clergy; a rigorous separation of the sexes within all monasteries; a stricter observance of the rules of the various communities, were accepted in principle, but in practice they were destined to remain a dead letter. The assembly, thus forced to acknowledge the reality of certain disorders which had brought shame on the National Church and compromised her future, did not fail to recognise their essential caus—the state of ignorance in which both clergy, the regular and the secular, continued to wallow. And it decided on opening a great number of schools for the education of priests. But it did nothing to insure the carrying out of this decision. It imagined, or feigned to imagine, that it could reckon, for this purpose, on the zeal and devotion of the poor popes, who were most of them forced to beg, and did not themselves possess the requisite learning; and the wealthy Bishops and archimandrites refused any personal contributions, and refused, too, in this case, to admit the necessity of beginning at the beginning—in other words, of raising the intellectual standard of the upper ecclesiastical hierarchy in the first place. Macarius himself was apt to commit the grossest errors in the interpretation and selection of his texts!

Under the influence, as we may suppose, of Maximus the Greek, the sobor turned its attention to the corruptions of the sacred books, and ordered the establishment of a printing-press—the first that ever existed at Moscow—to reprint them according to the most correct copies to be had. Alas! as my readers already know, the existence of this printing-press was of the shortest, thanks to a local tumult. All that remained were the interdicts pronounced by the assembly at the same time on certain impious and heretical works. But, alas, again! these works—the Secreta Secretorum, a repertory of the science of the Middle Ages, here called Aristotel, and ascribed to Aristoteles, and the astronomical tables of Emmanuel Ben Jacob, known under the title of the Chestokryl—constituted the whole profane literature of the country. And to save its face, reply to the accusations of immorality, and flatter the ascetic