Pobedonostsev: The Church (Part II)

II

The difference between the social spirit and composition of the Anglo-Saxon and the Russian races
is noticeable nowhere so much as in the Church. In an English church, more than anywhere else, the
thought occurs to the ^Russian, There are many good things here, yet I am thankful that I was born in Russia. In our churches all social distinctions are laid aside, we surrender our positions in the world and mingle completely in the congregation before the face of God. Our churches for the most part have been built with the money of the people ; between rouble and grosh there is no distinction ; in all cases our churches are the work and the appanage of the
whole people. The poorest beggar feels, with the greatest noble, that the church, at least, is his. The church is the only place (how happy are we to have one such place !) where the poorest man in rags will not be asked, "Why art thou here, and who art thou?" It is the only place where the rich may not say to the poor, "Your place is not beside me, but behind."

Enter an English church and watch the congregation. It is devout ; solemn it may be, but it is a
congregation of "ladies and gentlemen," each with a place specially reserved ; the rich in separate and embellished pews, like the boxes of an opera-house. We cannot help thinking that this church is merely a reunion of people in society, and that there is place in it only for what society calls " the respectable." All use their prayer-books, but each has his own, which makes it plain that he wishes to be alone before God, and in no way to sacrifice his individuality. It is said that in the last twenty or thirty years a remarkable change has taken place in this ;
the places in the churches are to a great extent free, and access to them is easier than before ; but in former times, more particularly in the provinces, the pews were constructed with closed partitions, so that the occupant might pray in peace, alone, and undisturbed by any neighbour. How plainly these dispositions reveal the history of a feudal society, and even the history of the Reformation in England. " Nobility and gentry" lead in all, because they possess and
appropriate all. All is bought by conquest, even the right to sit in church. The celebration of
divine service is a privilege sold at a fixed price. In England the preferment of clergymen, with right to fixed incomes, is the hereditary right of " patronage," and the power of election to the ministry is the appanage either of the local proprietors or of the Crown, by virtue not so much of the rights of the State as of the rights of the feudal possessors. Thus the clergy, appointed independently of the people, and independent of the people for their maintenance, appear above it as princes placed above their subjects. The offices of the Church are, first of all, a "preferment," an appanage ; and, it is shameful to say so, this appanage is the object of traffic. The office of incumbent may be bought for a certain sum, determined by the capitalisation of the income, as in our country the positions of attorneys, notaries, and brokers. In any English newspaper you may find a special department for the advertisement of these
so-called "preferments," you may see a series of offers of the office of incumbent, with a statement of the income ; the amenities of the position will be praised, the house and its situation described, the price indicated, with the information that the present incumbent is so many years old, and is not likely to enjoy his position long. In London appears a journal {The Church Preferment Register) specially devoted to this traffic, with a detailed description of every office, its amenities and revenue, for the information of those who might buy.

We are told that, from the political point of view, every right, personal or social, should be attained by competition alone. This observation may be generally true, but it cannot be applied to the right of praying in church. We must not wonder, then, that the conscience of the people is not satisfied with the constitution of the Church, and that England, the country of an Established State Church, the classic country of theological learning and religious discussion, has become, since the Reformation, the country of dissidence too. The need of religion
and the need of prayer in the mass of the people, finding no satisfaction in the Established Church, seek issue in free and independent congregations and in diverse sects. The different sects
which flourish in the most insignificant village are innumerable. The Established Church itself is
divided into three schools, the so-called High, Low, and Broad Churches, and the partisans of
each have their own churches, and will not enter the churches of others. In the smallest villages, with a settled population of no more than five hundred, three Anglican churches may sometimes be found, and, in addition, three Methodist churches of different denominations, distinguished only by verbal subtleties and capricious details, yet cut off from all communion with one another. There will be one chapel for Primitive or Wesleyan Methodists, another
for Congregationalists, one for the so-named Bible Christians - these last are also Methodists, who severed their connection some years ago because they opposed the others in believing that those invested in the office of the evangelists ought not to be married. Such a number of churches, large, handsome, and roomy, may be found in a single village. All these sects are distinguished by peculiarities of doctrine, sometimes very subtle and capricious, or altogether absurd, but, apart from differences of doctrine, all are inspired by a desire for a popular
Church, free to all, and many by implacable hatred of the Established Church and of its ministers.
In addition to these separate sects, in the midst of the Established Church itself a numerous party has been formed under the name of the Free Church Movement. Individuals and societies procure for simple folk the means of participating in divine service ; for this purpose they build special churches, and hire buildings, theatres, sheds, and halls. This movement has produced a visible reaction in the practice of the Established Church, and has forced it to throw
its doors more widely open. But is it not strange that in England the masses have been forced to
conquer in battle what among us has always been free as the air we breathe?

How often do we hear in Russia strange words about our Church from men who have been abroad, who love to judge everything after the manner of strangers ; and, on the other hand, from simple men
infatuated with ideals to the estrangement of reality.These men have no limit to their praise of the Anglican and German Churches, and of the Anglican clergy, and to their condemnation of our Church and our clergy. If we believe them, there all is living activity, while among us all is death, rudeness, or sleep ; there is work, here ceremonial and inactivity. It is not surprising
that people speak thus. Men judge by appearance. To judge by dress is easy, but much thought and
observation are needed to learn the spirit and significance of things. Men seize on impressions and cling thereto. There are many for whom the first and final factors in creating impressions are external perfection, manner, dexterity, purity, and respectability. Judged by this standard, there is much to be admired in the Anglican Church, and much to be lamented in our own. Few of us have not met men of the world, and, unhappily, even ecclesiastics, who exalt the simplicity which they find in religion abroad, and condemn our own for " immaturity." Such judgments are as much to be deplored, as the conduct of a young man who, having spent some time in the fashionable world in the midst of the refinements of a metropolis, returns to the village where he has
spent his childhood, and looks with contempt on his modest surroundings, and on the rude and simple manners of his family circle.

By nature we are much inclined to be infatuated with beauty of form, with organisation, with the
external perfection of things. Thence springs the passion for imitation, and for transplanting to our soil those foreign institutions which attract us by their external symmetry. But we forget, or remember too late, that those institutions were historically evolved; they sprang and developed from historical conditions, and are the logical consequence of the past, created
of necessity. History cannot be changed or evaded; and history itself, with its actions, its actors, and its complex polity, is the product of the national spirit, as the history of the individual is the product of his living soul. The same may be said of all systems of church organisation. Therein all things conform to the spiritual basis whereon they have grown; too often charmed with the superstructure, we neglect the base; otherwise, we should not, perhaps, have hesitated to reject this ready-made symmetry, but with gladness should have clung to
our old and rough form, or deformity, until such day as our spiritual nature had evolved a new one for us. In all human institutions the spirit is essential: hence we should zealously preserve it from distortion and alloy.

From its dawn to the present day our Church has been the church of the people, inspired by love, and all-embracing, without distinction of class. The faith has sustained our peoples in the day of privation and calamity, and one thing only can sustain, strengthen,and regenerate them, and that is faith, the faith of the Church alone. Our people is reproached with ignorance in its religion ; its faith, we are told, is defiled by superstition; it suffers from corrupt and wicked
practices ; its clergy is rude, inactive, ignorant, and oppressed, without influence on its flocks. In this reproach is much truth, but these evils are in no way essential, but temporary and adventitious. They spring from many circumstances, from political and economic conditions, with the disappearance of which they also will disappear. What then is essential ? The love of the people for its Church, the conception of the Church as a common possession, a congregation common in all things, the total absence of social distinctions, the communion of the people with the ministers of the Church, sprung from the people, and differing neither in manner of life, in virtues, nor in failings, who stand and fall with their flocks. This is a soil which would bring forth rich fruits with good cultivation, with less concern for the amelioration of life than the bettering of the soul, with less desire that the number of churches exceed not the needs of the people than that those needs shall not remain unsatisfied. Is it for us to covet, through rumour from afar, the Protestant Church and its ministers? May Heaven withhold from us the time when our priests shall be officials, placed above the people as princes above their subjects, in the
position of men of society with complex needs and desires, while surrounded on every side by privation and simplicity.

By reflection on life we are convinced that for every man in the course of his spiritual development, the thing most precious and essential is to preserve inviolate the simple inborn feeling of humanity in his human relations, and to nourish truth and freedom in his spiritual conceptions and impulses. This is the impregnable fortress which guards and delivers the soul from the onslaught of rank, and from all artificial theories which corrupt insensibly the simple
moral sentiment. However precious in some respects these forms and theories may be, when rooted in the soul they corrupt its simple and healthy conceptions and sensations, they confound the notions of truth and untruth, and destroy the roots from which healthy men develop in relation to their fellow-creatures. This is the essential which so often we neglect when seduced by externals. How many men, how many institutions have been perverted in the course of a false development, for these rooted principles in our religious institutions are of all things the most precious. May God prevent them ever being destroyed by the untimely reformation of our Church!