Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/468

442 a menace to autocracy. It was Witte who proved vacillating and indecisive as first premier, his only ideal being to maintain and fortify the state authority. The same ideal underlay his plea on behalf of the Russian church. He was not concerned about religion for its own sake, but hoped to strengthen the state by strengthening the church!

The modern liberal believes only in the state and its providence; but in an hour weighty with responsibilities Witte recalled religion to mind, for the infallibility and providence of his secular god seemed to him a broken reed in view of the personalities through whom that deity's activities secured expression.

Bulgakov contends that the mission of the intelligentsia is to secure a return to Christ—to Christ, not to Kant or to Hume. For Bulgakov, Christ means the Orthodox church, though he is forced to admit that all is not in order in the official church. His desire is that malcontents shall not leave the church, shall not exult over its defects, but shall endeavour to reform it from within. Moreover, to one who has faith in the mystical life of the church, the historically extant outward form of the institution cannot possibly be a stumbling-block.

It had been my impression that Bulgakov's conversion was the outcome of genuine religious need, and I was therefore eager to ascertain what had been his attitude towards the electoral alliance between the synod and the reaction. In his account of the elections to the fourth duma he speaks of the conduct of the synod with much indignation. He even goes so far as to say that Russia is actually perishing under our eyes, that "Holy" Russia has allied herself with the basest elements of the mob. Russia, he continues, is poisoned by a twofold nihilism, the nihilism of the intelligentsia and the nihilism of the bureaucracy, and the latter is the worse. He deplores that hitherto his attacks have been too exclusively directed against the former, but consoles himself in the end with the reflection that "belief in the church is not inseparably connected with the status quo of her extant local organisations."

These are remarkable concessions from a defender of the church. Bulgakov makes us feel that he finds the church too narrow for him, but that he is able for the time being to salve his conscience by talking of the churches as "local