their minds. If a bishop sometimes complains to
an intimate friend that he has been brought to St. Petersburg and made
a member of the Synod merely to append his signature to official papers
and to give his consent to foregone conclusions, his displeasure is
directed, not against the Emperor, but against the Procureur. He is
full of loyalty and devotion to the Tsar, and has no desire to see his
Majesty excluded from all influence in ecclesiastical affairs; but he
feels saddened and humiliated when he finds that the whole government of
the Church is in the hands of a lay functionary, who may be a military
man, and who looks at all matters from a layman's point of view.

This close connection between Church and State and the thoroughly
national character of the Russian Church is well illustrated by the
history of the local ecclesiastical administration. The civil and the
ecclesiastical administration have always had the same character and
have always been modified by the same influences. The terrorism which
was largely used by the Muscovite Tsars and brought to a climax by Peter
the Great appeared equally in both. In the episcopal circulars, as in
the Imperial ukazes, we find frequent mention of "most cruel corporal
punishment," "cruel punishment with whips, so that the delinquent and
others may not acquire the habit of practising such insolence," and much
more of the same kind. And these terribly severe measures were sometimes
directed against very venial offences. The Bishop of Vologda, for
instance, in 1748 decrees "cruel corporal punishment" against priests
who wear coarse and ragged clothes,* and the records of the Consistorial
courts contain abundant proof that such decrees were rigorously
executed. When Catherine II. introduced a more humane spirit into the
civil administration, corporal punishment was at once abolished in the
Consistorial courts, and the procedure was modified according to the
accepted maxims of civil jurisprudence. But I must not weary the reader
with tiresome historical details. Suffice it to say that, from the time
of Peter the Great downwards, the character of all the more energetic
sovereigns is reflected in the history of the ecclesiastical
administration.

* Znamenski, "Prikhodskoe Dukhovenstvo v Rossii so vremeni
reformy Petra," Kazan, 1873.

Each province, or "government," forms a diocese, and the bishop, like
the civil governor, has a Council which theoretically controls his