DISSENTING POLITICS.
The revolution made by Nikon, ending in the rupture of his Church,
gave vast importance to dissenting bodies, while opening up a field
for missionaries and impostors of every kind. Before his reign as
patriarch, the chief dissidents were the Eunuchs, the Self-burners,
the Flagellants, the Sabbath-keepers, and the Silent Men; all of whom
could trace their origin to foreign sources and distant times. They
had no strong grip on the public mind. But, in setting up a state
religion--an official religion--a persecuting religion--from which a
majority of the people held aloof, in scorn and fear, the patriarch
provided a common ground on which the wildest spirits could meet and
mix. Aiming at one rule for all, the Government put these Old
Believers on a level with Flagellants and Eunuchs; the most
conservative men in Russia with the most revolutionary men in Europe.
All shades of difference were confounded by an ignorant police,
inspired in their malign activities by a band of ignorant monks. So
long as the persecution lasted, a man who would not go to his parish
church, pray in the new fashion, cross himself in the legal way, and
bend his knee to Baal, was classed as a separatist, and treated by the
civil power as a man false to his Emperor and his God.
Thus the Old Believers came to support such bodies as the Milk
Drinkers and Champions of the Holy Spirit, much as the old English
Catholics joined hands with Quakers and Millennialists in their common
war against a persecuting Church. These dissidents have learned to
keep their own secrets, and to fight the persecutor with his own
carnal weapons. They, too, keep spies. They have secret funds. They
place their friends on the press. They send agents to court whom the
Emperor never suspects. They have relations with monks and ministers,
with bishops and aides-de-camp; they not unfrequently occupy the
position of monk and minister, bishop and aide-de-camp. They go to
church; they confess their sins; they help the parish priest in his
need; they give money to adorn convents; and in some important cases
they don the cowl and take religious vows. These persons are not
easily detected in their guile; unless, indeed, fanaticism takes with
them a visible shape. In passing through the province of Harkof, I
hear in whispers of a frightful secret having come to light; no less
than a discovery by the police that in the great monastery of Holy
Mount, in that province, a number of Eunuchs are living in the guise
of Orthodox monks!
Every day the council is surprised by reports that some man noted for
his piety and charity is a dissenter; nay, is a dissenting pope;
though he owns a great mill and seems to devote his energies to trade.
The reigning Emperor, hating deceit, and most of all self-deceit,
looks steadily at the facts. No doubt, if he could put these
dissidents down he would; but, like a man of genius, he knows that he
must work in this field of thought by wit and not by power. "No
illusions, gentlemen." From the first year of his reign he has been
asking for true reports, and searching into the statements made with a
steadfast yearning to find the truth.
What comes of his study is now beginning to be seen of men. The
Official Church has not ceased to be official, and even tyrannical;
but the violence of her persecution is going down; the regular clergy
have been softened; the monkish fury has been curbed; and lay opinion
has been coaxed into making a first display of strength.
A minute was laid by the Emperor before his council of ministers so
early as Oct. 15 and 27, 1858, for their future guidance in dealing
with dissenters; under which title the Holy Governing Synod still
classed the Old Believers with the Flagellants and Eunuchs! The minute
written by his father was not removed from the books; it was simply
explained and carried forward; yet the change was radical; since the
police, in all their dealings with religious bodies, were instructed
to talk in a gentler tone, and to give accused persons the benefit of
every doubt which should occur on points of law. A change of spirit is
often of higher moment than a change of phrase. Without implying that
either his father was wrong, or the Holy Governing Synod unjust, the
Emperor opened a door by which many of the nonconformists could at
once escape. But what was done only shows too plainly how much remains
to do. The Emperor has checked the persecutor's arm; he has not
crushed the persecuting spirit.
A special committee was named by him to study the whole subject of
dissent; with the practical view of seeing how far it could be
conscientiously tolerated, and in what way it could be honestly
repressed.
This committee made their report in August, 1864; a voluminous
document (of which some folios only have been printed); and adopting
their report, the Emperor added to the paper a second minute, which is
still the rule of his ministers in dealing with such affairs. In this
minute he recognizes the existence of dissent. He acknowledges that
dissidents may have civil and religious rights. Of course, as head of
the Church, he can not suffer that Church to be injured; but he
desires his ministers, after taking counsel with the Holy Governing
Synod, and obtaining their consent at every step, to see that justice
is always done.
The spirit of this imperial minute is so good that the monks attack
it; not in open day and with honest words; for such is not their
method and their manner; but with sly suggestions in the confessor's
closet and serpentine whispers near the sacred shrines. It is
unpopular with the Holy Governing Synod. But the conservatives and
sectaries, long cast down, look up into what they call a new heaven
and a new earth. They say the day of peace has come, and finding a
door of appeal thrown open to them in St. Petersburg, they are sending
in hundreds of petitions; here requesting leave to open a cemetery,
there to construct an altar, here again to build a church. In
thirty-two months (Jan. 1866 to Sept. 1868), the home ministry
received no less than three hundred and sixty-seven petitions of
various kinds.
Valouef, the minister in power when this imperial minute was first
drawn up, had a difficult part to play between his liberal master and
the retrograde monks. No man is strong enough to quarrel with the
tribunal sitting in St. Isaac's Square; and Valouef was wrecked by his
zeal in carrying out the imperial plan. The minister had to get these
fathers to consent in every case to the petitioner's prayer; these
fathers, who thought dissenters had no right to live, and kept on
quoting to him the edicts of Nicolas, as though that sovereign were
still alive! On counting his papers at the end of those thirty-two
months of trial, Valouef found that out of three hundred and
sixty-seven petitions in his office, the Holy Governing Synod
consented to his granting twenty-one, postponing fifty, and rejecting
all the rest.
A man, who said he was born in the Official Church, begged leave to
profess dissenting doctrine, which he had come to see was right:
refused. A merchant offered to build a chapel for dissenters in a
dissenting village: refused. A builder proposed to throw a wall across
a convent garden, so as to divide the male from the female part:
refused. A dissenting minister asked to be relieved from the daily
superintendence of his city police: refused. Michaeloff, a rich
merchant of St. Petersburg, offered to found a hospital for the use of
dissenters near the capital, at his personal charge: refused. Last
year an asylum for poor dissenters was opened at Kluga; an asylum
built by peasants for persons of their class: the Synod orders it to
be closed.
Hundreds of petitions come in from Archangel, Siberia, and the
Caucasus, from men who were in other days transported to those
districts for conscience' sake, requesting leave to come back. These
petitions are divided by the Holy Governing Synod, into two groups:
(1.) those of men who have been judged by some kind of court; (2.)
those of men who have been exiled by a simple order of the police. The
first class are refused in mass without inquiry; a few of the second
class, after counsel taken with the provincial quorum, are allowed.
From these examples, it will be seen that the liberal movement is not
reckless; but the movement is along the line; the work goes on; and
every day some progress is being made. A minister who has to work with
a board of monks must feel his way.