Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/235

Rh The evil is a narrow and shallow policy of obscurantism, sinning against the Holy Spirit.

The evil is the keeping of the people in ignorance. The remedy is the spread of popular education, the diffusion of sweetness and light.

But greatest of all political evils in the Russian Empire has been the insensate dream of religious unity, imposed by authority, the pagan confusion of spiritual and temporal power. The remedy is the separation of Church and State, equal rights to all the Churches, the releasing of the tremendous spiritual forces latent in the Russian people. The Slavophiles are ever opposing their three mystical and equivocal watchwords: "Samoderjavie," "Pravoslavie," "Narodnost," autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality—to the three revolutionary watchwords, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." No doubt it is quite possible to see in the Slavophile doctrine a healthy reaction against a blind imitation of the West, it is quite possible to read a deeper meaning into the Slavophile Trinity, just as it is quite possible to read a perverted meaning into the French Trinity. The Slavophile principle of "Samoderjavie," or Autocracy, may only stand for the necessity