Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/50

 26 and no corporation as yet. That was to be set up, by virtue of ukases, in Peter the Great's time, and Catherine the Second's—the march of history never evolved it.

Thus these elements, as separate as all their fellows, and bereft—after the ruin of Pskov and Novgorod, consequent on their absorption into the great Empire—of the only centres in which they could have attained to efficacious association, shared in the general servitude, and were utterly incapable of playing the part in the rise and progress of civilization so brilliantly borne by the town communities of the West.

The Church remained. I shall now show how she, too, failed, partly on account of the same causes, to follow the path of her Western rivals in this matter.

By the prestige attaching to her functions in this land of a robust faith, by her position as the depositary of all knowledge and the sole imparter of instruction, and even by her material resources, the Church was a mighty power. Comprising, from early in the sixteenth century, the ten eparchies of Moscow, Novgorod, Rostov, Vologda, Souzdal, Riazan, Smolensk, Kolomna, Saraïsk, and Perm, she exercised, within their borders, a far-reaching authority, at once spiritual and civil, alike over her clerical servants and her lay administrators, episcopal boïars and diaks, lieutenants and bailies. To exercise justice meant, in those days, to levy taxes on those amenable to it, and this order of things, copied from the civil organization of the country, and borrowing therefrom a system of imposition based on private rights, while it added to the strength of the institution which took advantage of it, was not calculated to increase its moral authority. It was destined, indeed, to feel the reform which tended, in the course of the sixteenth century, to the erection of several administrative centres into autonomous communes. On the model of what then happened in the matter of civil administration, representative persons, starosts, duly elected and sworn in, were introduce in every jurisdiction, and the civil and spiritual jurisdictions were separated. But this arrangement was ephemeral. The State, which had outlined it by a mere accident, under the influence of the liberal tendencies reaching it from the West, very soon returned, as we shall see, to its original despotism, and the Church followed this second current as she had followed the first.

It was her destiny to be identified, all through the course of time, with that other power, the rival of her own, till an almost