Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/282

 258 of mind, preserved by this man at a moment when the strongest of mental temperaments might very well have betrayed some symptoms, however fleeting, of weakness and confusion. On the very morrow of the Moscow executions, which had followed on those at Novgorod—hideous scenes, all of them, however exaggerated we must suppose the accounts of them to have been—we behold him accepting, even provoking, and prosecuting, untiringly and without any visible difficulty, a theological discussion such as might well have disconcerted a layman like himself at any time.

It was at this moment that his famous public conversation with John Rokita, a member of the Confraternity of the Bohemian and Moravian Brothers, took place.

At that time Protestants enjoyed a comparatively privileged position in Russia. They were looked on as allies against the Latinism every Russian loathed. Lutherans and Calvinists alike had obtained permission to build churches in the capital, and Ivan bestowed the most gracious welcome on the English and German representatives of the Reform who came to his Court either as visitors, or to enter his service. He was even fond of listening to Magnus' chaplain, Christian Bockhorn, and went so far as to speak highly of his teachings. If, he said, Luther, when he attacked the Papacy, had not also attacked the ancient ecclesiastical hierarchy, and soiled his interpretation of Scripture by a shameful renunciation of the monastic rule and habit, his doctrine would have been exceedingly acceptable. And, indeed, Bockhorn and his co-religionists—all of them taken up with their careers and their trade—did not push the advantage they had thus acquired over far. Missenheim's apostulate seems to have been quite an isolated instance, and one of the Danish missionary's disciples, Gaspard Eberfeld, said to have made an attempt to convert the Tsar, would appear to be one and the same person with a certain Gaspard von Wittemberg who himself, if we are to believe Oderborn, became a convert to the Orthodox faith, and the determined detractor of his former religion. In the provinces bordering on Sweden and Livonia a certain current of Protestant missionary feeling was tolerated for political reasons. Elsewhere, this tolerance was the mere outcome of the scornful indifference of the general mind.

Quite as an exception, Rokita, who had gone to Moscow with an embassy from the King of Poland, attempted to follow in the footsteps of Missenheim. This reformer, a Tchek by birth, was considered one of the most active members of the community of Bohemian Brothers established in Sigismund's dominions, and his correspondence goes to prove him to have been charged with a mission on which he and his party had