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288 answers to the third section. He was examined before this department for the letters he had written to his father during the arrest of his friend Samarin.

To Aksakov, as to so many in Europe as well as in Russia, the year 1848 brought proof that European civilisation was decadent, and he considered that the day of nonrevolutionary Russia had now arrived. All that he desired was that Russia should maintain her spiritual independence and should not become involved in western affairs. But Russia, Orthodox Russia, once more moved her armies westward to stamp out the revolution in Hungary and to support Austria, a land for which the nationalist slavophils had no liking. In the year 1850 we read: "Russia will soon separate into two halves; Orthodoxy will take the side of the state, the government, the infidel nobility, and those of the clergy whose faith is lukewarm, whilst all others will turn towards the raskol." In 1856 he wrote: "For God's sake be careful in the use of the words nationality and Orthodoxy"; and he declared that it was impossible to have any sympathy "with prepetrine Russia, with official Orthodoxy or with the monks." Aksakov delighted in frequent visits to Europe.

Ivan Aksakov was the journalist of slavophilism. More especially after the death of Kirěevskii and Homjakov did he maintain the slavophil tradition in his periodicals, formulating the doctrine in relation to the questions of the day.

He held firmly to the teaching of Homjakov, regarding ideal Orthodoxy as the guardian of nationality, but in practice he did not invariably succeed in distinguishing this Orthodoxy from the state church.

Homjakov's religious outlook, logically adopted, could not fail to induce a repulsion from the errors of the state church and from ecclesiastical religion, but the quietism of the slavophils was apt to induce them to tolerate the official church. Aksakov displayed his own religious sentiments as an official in his anything but conciliatory attitude towards the raskolniki, and subsequentlyi n his approval of Gogol's religious conversion.

Aksakov thought that the church could be strengthened against the state by the revival of the patriarchate, which had been abolished by Peter. The priesthood was to be invigorated by the introduction of district councils and provincial councils. He referred to the paragraphs of the legal code, more than a thousand in number, by which the relations between