Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/178

 154 tendencies of the epoch by giving itself an appearance of rigorous austerity, the assembly took good care to renew all the Church's anathemas against profane amusements.

Quite as empty was the shadow of administrative reform embodied in the autonomous institutions the new Code had proposed to call into life. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as exercised by the Bishops' delegates, whether boïars, clerks, or tithing-men, gave lively cause for complaint. The suppression of these magistrates did not seem feasible; they had existed under the great Metropolitans Peter and Alexis! The popes were given leave to have themselves represented, for judicial purposes, by elected starosts and hundreders, but the assembly forgot to define the part these representatives were to play!

And yet, in spite of its weaknesses and failures, the labours of the assembly of 1551 do not seem to me to deserve the scorn which has fallen upon them in their own day, seeing that the very anathema with which it was smitten at a later date, by the conciliable of 1667, attests the scope and comparative boldness of its endeavour. Is not the fact, in a society so depraved and generally devoid of knowledge—a society in which no ideal existed, and given over to the rule of the coarsest instincts—that a handful of men attained so much, and asked a great deal more, a sufficient title to our indulgence and even to our respect? Attempts have been made to minimize and even to deny Ivan's share in the result obtained. Silvester or Adachev, Maximus the Greek or Macarius, we are told, did it all, even to inspiring or formulating the famous set of questions on which the deliberations of the assembly were based. Most assuredly, the young Tsar neither acted nor thought alone. Even during the progress of the debate, the earlier decisions of the conciliable were sent to the Troïtsa, where Jehosaphat, the former Metropolitan, Alexis, a former Bishop of Rostov, and a few other ecclesiastics, had to pronounce upon them. It was in consequence, indeed, of this consultation, as it would appear, that the question of the monastic properties, first put aside, and then brought back under discussion, was solved in the sense I have just indicated. But Jehosaphat and his comrades, all of them former ecclesiastical dignitaries in disgrace, and avowed partisans of Nil Sorski's, could only have been called into consultation in this way by virtue of some act of high authority, which certainly did not proceed from the council itself. Silvester is mentioned as having been one of the monks who brought back Jehosaphat's views from the Troïtsa. He would not have applied for them on his own account, and we may even doubt whether he would have had any desire to serve the cause of the ascetics 'beyond the Volga' in this fashion. The coarse asceticism of the Domostroï was also invoked by the