Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/469

Rh organisations." The association between the synod and the "black hundred" was not fortuitous, however, for the church is unprogressive and reactionary by tradition and on principle. "Sint ut sunt aut non sint,” applies to the third Rome no less than to the second.

Struve seeks a similar expedient, saying, "the Christian faith has no intimate connection with any specific political forms and institutions." But apart from the consideration that the authors of Signposts were concerned, not with ideal Christianity, but with the actual Christianity of the Russian church, Struve is merely evading a straightforward answer to the religious problem.

Miljukov, too, notwithstanding his hostility to Struve and the others, shuns the issue of principle. He tells us that Tolstoi and Tolstoi’s religious crusade are a proof of the existence of "new possibilities" of religious development in Russia. Yet we cannot but remember that Tolstoi was excommunicated from the church of Pobědonoscev, and that he would have been sent to Siberia had it not been for the personal intervention of the tsar; we have, moreover, to enquire, what are the "new possibilities" of religious development of which Miljukov is thinking.

Let me quote once mere from Feuerbach. "I would not give a rush for political liberty if I were to remain a slave of religious fancies and prejudices. True freedom can be found there only where man is free also from the tyranny of religion."

Most of the Russian liberals adopted the same attitude towards religion as had been adopted by their European prototypes. Fundamentally they followed the teaching of old Tatiščev, who had advised his son never to renounce religious belief publicly and never to change his creed. Pirogov, the philosopher and pedagogue, gives expression in his diary to these rules of Descartes in the following words: "As long as I make no attempt to leave the bosom of the state church, as long as I raise no hand against that church, as long as I pay it all due respect, in a word, as long as I do nothing which can be construed as hostile to the national and state religion which I and my family profess, my personal faith, a matter which I keep to myself, is no one's business but my own."

Thus in the religious sphere Russian liberalism has become a system of indifferentism, and therein lies the secret of its weakness. Liberalism is not sceptical merely, but indifferent;