Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/549

Rh efficient and most stalwart champion of monarchy, was opposed to the absolutist and theocratic pretensions of the emperor, and was in effect a rebel.

This peculiar contrast between Catholicism with its anti-ecclesiastical negation, and Protestantism with its critical superecclesiasticism, can be discerned in the two greatest French philosophers of the revolution. Voltaire, the Catholic, is the revolutionary negation of the church; Rousseau, the Calvinist, endeavours to sustain democracy by means of a civil religion.

The Catholic apologists have a clear grasp of this distinction, and they rightly regard Protestantism as the foundation of modern development. Where they are mistaken is in their appraisement alike of the development and of the foundation.

Concurrently with the reformation was initiated the new antitheocratic development of humanity, the renaissance. Science and philosophy, all the intellectual forces of man grown self-conscious, combined to overthrow aristocratic theocracy, to cast off the spiritual oppression it exercised, and to secure a consistent application of liberty and equality on behalf of the democratic organisation of society.

EMOCRACY in Russia is in its inception. We know from our study of Russian history, how theocratic aristocracy developed as caesaropapism; the history of the liberation of the peasantry in 1861 is the history of an unwilling renunciation of aristocratic privileges. Not until the nineteenth century was well under way did men who were not of noble birth, the raznočincy, acquire notable positions in the administration, in the army, and in the field of literature, whilst simultaneously the industrialisation of agricultural land was creating a plutocracy. Saltykov summed up the