ABSTRACT
W e find ourselves in a totally different atmosphere when we turn to the East. During the nineteenth century the Church of Russia remained the predominant partner among the Orthodox Churches. With its membership of ninety millions and its sixty thousand clergy outside the monasteries it possessed a capital importance from weight of numbers alone. We have seen how Peter the Great put an end to the Patriarchate. From his time the Church was governed by the Holy Synod, which was in effect no synod at all, but an ecclesiastical committee under the supervision of a Procurator appointed by the Tsar. This Synod was recognised as a ‘brother’ by the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Antioch, but in point of fact the successive monarchs were all-powerful in its affairs. This was shown even in the case of a woman ruler like Catherine II, who had a political rather than a religious interest in the Church. She improved on Peter’s method of administering the monastic property by seizing practically the whole of it for governmental purposes. She had herself been brought up as a Lutheran, and although she had accepted Orthodoxy without a qualm, she sat loose to its profession and was able to display an independent attitude towards other varieties of religion, so long, at least, as they gave no political trouble. Thus she checked the persecution of Old Believers and allowed mosques to be built in Kazan, and sheltered the Jesuits when they were officially suppressed in 1773. She was an admirer of French institutions and founded the Smolny Institute for the education of the daughters of nobles, which she modelled upon the Institute founded at S. Cyr by Madame de Maintenon. She also introduced a scheme for providing schools throughout the country at the rate of one for every two hundred families, but as there were neither buildings, books, nor teachers the task was difficult, and she sought help from abroad. Consequently the instruction given in her schools followed the purely secular ideals of the Encyclopedists and earned much distrust on the part of the clergy, who became the enemies of popular education for many years.
