Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/415

Rh favour of Alexander, "I am as sure of his justice as of his existence."

From Madame de Krudener and her coterie he was also forced to separate himself. They criticised his public policy, and endeavoured to prescribe to him the line of action he ought to pursue, especially with regard to the Greeks. Alexander never forgot the past: he treated Madame de Krudener with great gentleness and forbearance, and never ceased to show her thoughtful personal kindness; but he had to tell her that he could allow no interference with his duties as monarch.

Nor was this the worst. All was not sunshine in the path of evangelical reform; and even the dissemination of the Word of truth did not seem to bring with it the unalloyed blessing that had at first been anticipated. On the contrary, there appeared to be some foundation for the gloomy forebodings of De Maistre, who, as a Roman Catholic, saw in the Bible Society only a means for overturning the whole ecclesiastical establishment of Russia. "Protestants on one side and Raskolniks on the other," said he, "are two files which saw the religion of the country at each end, and they must soon meet." Everywhere the new wine was fermenting and threatening to rend the old bottles. Ignorant soldiers and peasants rushed into wild forms of fanatical dissent, or tore down and destroyed sacred pictures, justifying their acts out of the Russian Testaments their Czar himself had distributed amongst them. Photi, and other zealots of the Greek Church,—who had their own reasons for dreading the influx of evangelical light,—eagerly took advantage of these disorders, not only to denounce such men as Galitzin and Tourgenieff, "who defy us the heirs of the apostles," but to ask the official head of the national Church whether he intended to stand by and see her torn to pieces, nay, himself to assist in the work of destruction?

This was a question Alexander certainly could not answer in