Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/40

Rh wars, culminating in national subjugation by the Tatars, the history of the Church alone affords some relief to the gloomy picture. It extended its peaceful conquests over the North and towards the West, and its annals are illustrated by the lives of holy men and devoted missionaries. As a body it gained in strength and vigor; its influence was courted and its assistance invoked by the rival claimants of the crown, but it suffered in its purity and dignity by stooping to favor the pretensions of the, for the moment, successful competitor, transferring its support from the weaker to the stronger, as they fell and rose. The fortunes of its primates depended upon those of the princes, and, as they passed in rapid succession on the throne, so bishop after bishop sat in the metropolitan chair, and, in the twelfth century, three rival prelates at one time claimed possession of ecclesiastical sovereignty.

Amid civil dissensions the Church again manifested its spirit of nationality and its impatience of foreign dictation. In 1147 a synod of native bishops elected Clement, a Russian prelate, as metropolitan, without reference to Constantinople.

Political anarchy had its parallel in doctrinal differences among the clergy, and then, as in the graver schisms to arise in later years, these differences related to matters of practice and not of dogma.

At the commencement of the twelfth century religious antagonism to the Church of the West was stimulated by national feeling in a struggle with a foreign enemy.

The orders of the Teutonic Knights and of the Brethren of the Sword, incited by Rome, had subdued Lithuania and Livonia. Under the banner of the Latin Church they attacked Russia on the west, aiming not merely at