Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/54

 30 inspired by a higher ideal, preferred the north-eastern countries, deserts and pathless forests, which but for them would long have checked the enterprise of their lay rivals. There they came into touch with the Finnish inhabitants, still sunk in idolatry; and labouring on their twofold task, breaking up the barren steppes and instructing pagan souls, they pushed onwards, ever onwards. Such a man was Phéodonite, a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible. On the banks of the Piétchenga, aided. by his comrade Triphonius, he taught agriculture and the truths of the Faith, at once, to bands of Lapps, who, hostile at first, threatening and ill-treating the pious hermits, ended by hearkening to their voice.

To the east, on the Tartar frontier, the religious apostolate marched abreast of the military conquest. Monastic establishments were pushed across the Soura as early as in the fourteenth century, long before the fall of Kazan, and from that time they followed, aided, and sometimes protected, the progress of the expansion of the nation. These monasteries, which everywhere commanded great resources, and were often strongly fortified, served as points of support for the campaigning armies. That of St. Cyril, with its ramparts garnished with artillery and its eight-and-thirty great towers, was more important, strategically speaking, than Novgorod.

And even if the affluence of the faithful towards favourite places of pilgrimage resulted in some unjustifiable trafficking at the fairs held on the various saints' days, if the legality of the money advances made by the monks to private individuals at interest generally reckoned at between 10 and 100 per cent. gave rise to painful controversies, a tradition which subsisted even down to the eighteenth century likewise held the wealth accumulated in these monasteries to be a sort of reserve fund, on which the country was entitled to draw in days of trouble. These treasures, like those laid up by the Egyptian priests, were not so jealously guarded as to prevent their forming part, in certain circumstances, of the common patrimony. Custom further demanded that no monastery should ever refuse food or temporary hospitality to any person. Even Princes and boïars took advantage of this rule, halted as they passed by these houses of God, and, having refreshed themselves, departed, laden with provisions for their journey. As to the poor, they looked on these establishments as being, in a sense, their own property. And the monasteries justified the pretension. On one single day, in a year of famine, 7,000 starving creatures were given bread at the monastery of Volokolamsk, and for months from 400 to 500 received their daily food. That was under Vassili Ivanovitch, father of the Terrible, and in the course of that year the prior Joseph sold the cattle and