Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/58

 34 common law of 'service,' there was but a step. Even the regular clergy did not escape it. While the archimandrites and priors of certain monasteries had their seats both at the lay and the religious council boards, the Russian monks, after the example of their Western brethren, were moved, at a very early date, to appeal to their Sovereign against the episcopal authority, just as the others appealed to the Pope; and the Sovereign lent a willing ear, until the time arrived when he felt himself strong enough to simplify all these relations by centralizing their jurisdiction in his own civil government.

Both orders of the clergy might certainly, by virtue of their ministry alone, have lifted themselves out of the downfall entailed on them by their common fate. But to that end, the intellectual dignity and moral value of their leaders, at all events, should have been on a par with the prestige of their sacred functions, and the light and heat shed by the flame of their august vocation should have kindled and burned as brightly in the centres of this autocephalous Church as in those of the West, where, even in Rome's worst disorders, such men as Leo X. and Pius V. shed a brilliance that fell on every side. Alack! our Cyrils and Ionas failed to discover any divine spark under the ashes of Byzantium!

Under Ivan III. the upper secular clergy still held out. A quarrel on some liturgical point set the Grand Duke and the Metropolitan by the ears. The latter abandoned his diocesan seat, left his churches unconsecrated, and thus forced the Sovereign to 'beat his forehead' in repentance. But when, under the successors of this Sovereign, himself not sufficiently strongly entrenched, as yet, in his omnipotence, it took more than a consciousness of outraged dignity to withstand a victorious despotism,—when St. Philip, the story of whose martyrdom I shall have to tell, sealed his lonely profession of independence and faith in disowned traditions with his blood, his voice found no echo, his example no followers. The Church, like all the rest of the nation, passed into the silence and the darkness, and there was another wheel in the great machine that ground up the intelligence and the wills of men.