Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/461

Rh sovereign, of German birth and education, and therefore more enlightened than her predecessors, but of scandalous morals, who ousted her feeble husband and usurped his authority. Although Peter the Great acquired large practical knowledge in the West and set a high value on European science, he was always a barbarian at heart, and he mocked the civilisation he mimicked. But Catherine, also deservedly called "the Great," really understood it and endeavoured to introduce genuine reforms on modern lines. The specific reform which Peter dreamed of and which Catherine effected was urgently needed. The Church had become a parasite on the State, a vampire sucking its life-blood, showing no life itself, but able to drain the life of the nation, fattening on the starvation of the people. An English contemporary writer says of the monasteries, "They have wrought that if any part of the realm be better and sweeter than other, there standeth a friary or monastery dedicated to some saint." The number of serfs belonging to the monks now amounted to nearly a million. Catherine appointed a mixed lay and ecclesiastical commission to arrange the transference both of the land and of its human property, the serfs. The one became crown land, and the other, remaining still in slavery, passed over to State ownership. In return it was ordered that a fixed revenue drawn from the public funds should be paid to the archimandrites for the support of their monks. Monasteries could now no longer acquire land without the sanction of the government. With the loss of their property the monks declined in independence and prestige. They also rapidly declined in numbers, although the number of the nuns is said to have been growing. There was a constant rivalry between the black clergy (the monks), and the white clergy (the parish popes), the black clergy trying to exercise authority over the white, who in turn endeavoured to evade their interference.

Napoleon's ill-fated attack on Russia distracted attention for a time from internal affairs, both civil and ecclesiastical