Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/25

 EMPEROR AND CZAR OF RUSSIA. 7 had made the holding and avowal of such an opinion impos- sible. Though the coins of Constantino and liis successors no longer proclaimed the emperor as a god, he still in the minds of his subjects retained many divine attributes. Before Constantino it was not merely that a divinity hedged in the ruler, but that the emperor himself was divinity. Although the adoption of Christianity by the state deprived him of the title, yet the popular idea would be likely to linger long. It became modified rather than completely changed, and had not altogether been forgotten even at the end of the twelfth century. In its new form it gave to the emperor the same position as a divine ruler which peasant opinion throughout Russia still attributes to the czar. While, therefore, it is impossible for us to realize the attitude of mind which -svor- shipped the emperor as divine, we may learn much from the curious analogy presented by the empire of the czar. In Eussia the czar, in the popular conception, is a sacred person ruling by divine authority, if not, indeed, through divine inspiration. In Russia alone would the mass of people feel no surprise if the ruler were to be spoken of as divine. In Russia alone are the ruler's acts unquestioned and unques- tionable by the bulk of the population. The halo of sanctity which still surrounded the Byzantine emperors was singularly like that w^itli which the Russian peasant surrounds the czar. Allowing for the presence in the nineteenth century of the newspaper press, of telegrams, and of railways, which compel a certain attention to political movements, not only in Russia but in other countries, we have in this respect a counterpart of the Byzantine empire during the Basilian epoch. All that the devout and ignorant Catholic attributes to the pope, add- ed to that which a country parson of the reign of Charles II., who was fully imbued with the principles of Filmer, attribut- ed to the sovereign who was the Lord's anointed, the Em- peror of Russia is to his subjects as the early emperors of the New Rome were to theirs. The conception was not precisely the doctrine of the Comparison diviue right of kings as such doctrine was de- divine right, veloped in Western Europe after the Reformation,