Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/147

Rh peasant-pastors from those of the peasant-tillers o the soil

Among the popes and monks there were men of profound knowledge, but even they were enmeshed in the toils of the Government, which knew how to use them skilfully. Such ecclesiastics worked among the educated radicals, among the aristocratic opposition and liberal bureaucracy. They, too, were the agents of the Government. And if one of them dared to propagate not the official, but the genuine mysticism of the Christian Church, then he soon felt the heavy and ruthless hand of the Holy Synod and the provincial Governor; he had either to leave his post for ever or to submit The official Russian Church, directed by the Synod or the Ministry of the Orthodox Church employed the popes and monks to fight socialism, anarchism, liberalism, the progress of true learning; to combat Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Mahommedanism, Buddhism, and Sectarianism; the hand of the Church was in the struggle against Tolstoy and other writers, opposing parliamentary institutions; often the clergy were employed for various political purposes, as the mouthpiece of popular expressions of devotion and loyalty to the dynasty, or as instrument for the organisation of pogroms of the Jews, Poles, and Tartars, and for political provocation.

The figures of the popes, Vostorgov, Gapon, Bishop Makar, and others, will for ever cast their terrible shadow upon the realities of Russian life.