Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/305

Rh biography that as early as 1891 this faith had been seriously shaken when he witnessed the devastations of the famine and the apathetic inertia of society. At this epoch he conceived constitutionalist hopes, but did not cherish them for long. For a time, even, he had thoughts of revolution, a revolution of a somewhat quaint character. He seriously believed that he would be able to persuade General Dragomirov and one of the dissatisfied princes of the church to place themselves at the head of the movement, and that the army and the people would thus be won over. Solov'ev's friends killed this great design by their ridicule.

In 1894, he produced Panmongolism, a work in which he had conceived the fall of the third Rome, without however following the example of the old Moscow chronicler, and mooting the possibility of a fourth Rome.

Writing in 1896 upon the relationship of Byzantinism to Russia, Solov'ev again displayed his scepticism concerning the mission of the third Rome.

Coming now to the period in which the antichrist was conceived, we find numerous documentary proofs that Solov'ev had abandoned his messianic designs. In 1898 he penned an essay to controvert the opinions of those who looked for the solution of the Russian and European question to be effected after some centuries by the simple law of superior force, and with the aid of the four hundred millions to which by then the population of Russia was to have increased. Solov'ev declared that many uncertain elements entered into such calculations; he pointed out that in the interior administrative districts of Russia the population had ceased to increase; and he appealed to "reflective and disquicting" patriotism to attend without delay to its duties of conscience.

He had also come to the conclusion that Europe is less corrupt than he had imagined in earlier years, when he had regarded positivism and socialism as affording the most striking manifestations of estrangement from God.

In like manner, he had altered his attitude towards the revolutionaries and the radicals.

In the autumn of 1898, delivering a lecture on Bělinskii, he represented that writer as an apostle of humanitarianism and of practical Christianity. Bělinskii's only defect was that he had not found the true faith. Solov'ev blames himself, however, for having allowed his attention to be monopolised