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

80POLITICS ANT) RELIGION IDENTICAL,

cultivated, and whom business brings into intercourse with western Europe, take the utmost pains to conceal the predominant national sentiment, which is the triumph of the Greek orthodoxy — with them synonymous with the policy of Russia.

" Without keeping this in view nothing can be explained either in our manners or our politics. You must not believe, for example, that the persecutions in Poland were the effect of the personal resentment of the Emperor: they were the result of a profound and deliberate calculation. These acts of cruelty are meritorious in the eyes of true believers; it is the Holy Spirit who so enlightens the sovereign as to elevate him above all human feelings ; and it is God who blesses him as the exeeutor of his high designs. By this manner of viewing things, judges and executioners become so much the greater saints as they are greater barbarians. Your legitimist journals little know what they are doing when they seek for allies. among schismatics. We shall see an European revolution before we shall see the Emperor of Russia acting in good faith with a Catholic power; the Protestants are at least open adversaries; besides, they will more readily reunite with the pope than the chief of the Russian autocracy; for the Protestants, having beheld all their creeds degenerate into systems, and their religions faith transformed into philosophic doubt, have nothing left but their sectarian pride to sacrifice to Rome ; whereas the Emperor possesses a real and positive spiritual power, which he will never voluntarily relinquish. Rome, and all that can be connected with the Romish church, has no more dangerous enemy than the autocrat of Moscow—visible