Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/130

Rh soldiery again raised the standard of revolt. Peter was absent from Russia, but, hurrying back, he abolished the institution, and wreaked such fearful and bloody vengeance upon the rebels as to call forth remonstrance, "in the name of the Mother of God," from Adrian, who was then patriarch. "Get thee home," was the fierce reply; "know that I reverence God and his most Holy Mother more earnestly perhaps than thou dost. It is the duty of my sovereign office, and a duty that I owe to God, to save my people from harm, and to prosecute, with direst severity, crimes that tend to the common ruin." His impatience of control and his growing determination to break down all opposition, even that of the Church, to his will, were thus early made manifest.

The patriarch Joachim died in 1690; although a lifelong enemy of Nikon, he, with the higher clergy, had accepted the changes in the Church service which Nikon introduced, but he shared the general dislike felt by all Russians of high and low degree for foreigners, and mourned the tsar's deplorable predilection for their society. His opposition to them, otherwise unavailing, was successfully exercised against teachers of foreign religions; the toleration hitherto extended to Calvinists and Lutherans was greatly restricted; Catholics were prohibited from celebrating mass in public; the Jesuits were banished; and Germans, accused of disseminating false and blasphemous doctrines, were burned at the stake. He left testamentary admonitions to the tsar, urging him to drive from Russia all heretics and unbelievers, enemies of the Orthodox faith, and to destroy their places of worship. His administration of the Church was characterized by decision and energy, and, notwithstanding the growth of Dissent and the influx of foreign ideas, its power and the extent of its sway was largely