Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/221

Rh place, the clergy were to be paid by the state, to make them economically independent of the ecclesiastical authority; thus priests, like other officials, would become entirely subject to the good will of the government. Secondly, there was to be a modification in the educational system. The spiritual academies were already fitted to the purposes of reaction. By the curriculum of these seminaries, persons being trained for the priesthood were for practical purposes completely cut off from secular literature and thought, and were trained entirely in the spirit of theology.

But further changes were in contemplation.

Hitherto at the seminaries priests and teachers had been educated side by side, but seminaries were to become purely theological schools, for the training of priests alone, in order that the pupils at these institutions could no longer have the chance of adopting a secular career, for the more efficient and energetic young men were now refusing to take orders, and the church was suffering greatly from a dearth of candidates for the priesthood.

From the clerical side the same aim was followed in the proposed reorganisation of the church schools which had been founded during the reign of Alexander III. The curriculum in these schools had at first lasted two years, and had subsequently been extended to three. They were now to be transformed into institutions containing six classes, and were to give a purely theological general education, so that it would be impossible for pupils to pass from them into other schools.

These suggested reforms were a return to the plans of Archbishop Antonii. They imitated the training given in Catholic theological schools. The state church was to return to the middle ages, to the prepetrine Moscow of the patriarch-tsar Filaret. It was the hope of the reactionaries that the reintroduction of the patriarchate would subserve the same end, although the majority of the clergy expected it to strengthen the church and to emancipate the church from the tutelage of the state. At court, medieval superstition was dominant, as was shown by the Rasputin affair and by other indications.

If the white terror forces on us the conviction that tsarist absolutism is not a divinely ordained institution, we learn also from the sanction which the church is so ready to give to absolutism that the latter has no justification in appealing to God and to God's will for its policy and for its existence.