Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/179

 Rh Iosiflianié. It was the standard of the official Church. Among the materials which served for the composition of the Stoglav some people have included the epistle addressed to Ivan by the pope of the Church of the Annunciation. I have already said that the authorship of this epistle is doubtful, and only one of the subjects of which it treats was touched by the conctliable—the question of wearing beards, which Silvester connects with that struggle against the sin of sodomy, which seems to have been the great anxiety of the author of the Domostroï. And his point of view is the one generally taken up by the moralists of this school, their idea being that 'beardless men, by making themselves look more like women, were more liable to stir sinful desire in others.'

Young as Ivan was, his intelligence and education both raised him to a higher level than this. The set of questions the conciliable had to consider was not only presented to it in the Sovereign's name, but partly written by his own hand; and a comparison with other and later writings by the same author reveals his personal mark as strongly apparent in it—not his thought only, but his forms of speech, his way of putting things, cutting like a knife, vigorous and biting, rugged and blunt. Nothing here recalls Silvester, with his inferior composition and poverty of thought. Even on questions of liturgy, as to which Macarius may well have directed him, Ivan was always to give proof of very wide information.

Further, no study of the 'Book of the Hundred Chapters' was attempted till at a comparatively recent period, and the text available was incomplete, and gave rise to a great deal of uncertainty. The Stoglav, which fell under interdict in the year 1667, escaped the curiosity of historians for two whole centuries. Macarius may probably be considered as the author of the relative failure of the work of 1551, and the chief organizer of the assembly's opposition to the reforming tendencies of Nil Sorski and Jehosaphat, and the personal inclinations of the Sovereign. The Metropolitan did advocate a reform, but one which would have operated in a different direction. He turned his back on all progress, and saw no salvation save in a return to the past and its traditions, which had been scorned and violated, and to the old arbitrary ideal of the primitive Christians. This ideal consisted in a piety based on a scrupulous performance of rite; a Church with a mighty hierarchy entrenched in the very heart of the aristocracy, and rolling up more wealth, 'which came to her from God,' from year to year; an understanding with the State, on the basis of mutual support; the merciless putting down of heresy; and no schools at all. As for Jehosaphat's opinions, they would certainly never have been either received or sought for but for the inter-