Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

CHRISTIAN CHURCHES.311

will never obey, from the bottom of their hearts, a dependent clergy.

The time is not far distant when it will be acknowledged that, in matters of religion, what is more essential even than obtaining the liberty of the flock, is the assuring that of the pastor.

The multitude always obey the men whom they take for guides : be they priests, doctors, poets, sages, or tyrants, the minds of the people are in their hands ; religious liberty for the mass is therefore a chimera; but it is on this account the more important that the man charged with performing the office of priest for them should be free : now, there is not in the world an independent priest except the Catholic.

Slavish pastors can only guide barren minds: a Greek pope will never do more than instruct a people to prostrate themselves before violent power. Let me not be asked, then, whence it comes that the Russians have no imagination, and how it is that they only copy imperfectly.

When, in the West, the descendants of the barbarians studied the ancients with a veneration that partook of idolatry, they modified them in order to appropriate them. Who can recognise Virgil in Dante, or Homer in Tasso, or Justinian and the Roman laws in the codes of feudalism ? The passionate respect then professed for the past, far from stifling genius, aroused it: but it is not thus that the Russians have availed themselves of us.

When a people counterfeit the social forms of another community, without penetrating into the spirit which animates it — when they seek lessons in civilisation, not from the ancient founders of human