rom the dress of
the regular troops of the empire. The papas and their bishops are under
the direction of the emperor, a regiment of clerks, and that is all.(126)
It is in order to extend the advantages of this military organization to
the Christians of Turkey that Russia, according to the opinion of our
author, "_is __ under the paramount necessity of making their cause her
own_." All that I say is, that she felt the same necessity of making the
cause of the Greeks and Protestants of Poland _her own_, and that she
ended by making the same thing with their country.

The politico-religious complications into which Europe has now been thrown
by the ambition of Russia have induced me particularly to dwell upon the
means which the church of that country offers for the promotion of the
political schemes of its rulers. With regard to the superstitious
practices borrowed from Paganism, and peculiar to that church, the most
remarkable is, perhaps, that heathen custom called _parentales_, mentioned
before, p. 62, and which may be found in different parts of Russia. People
assemble on Monday, after the Easter week, in churchyards, where they eat
and drink to great excess, in commemoration of their deceased relatives.
There are many other similar practices, as, for instance, that of
providing the dead body with a kind of passport or written testimony of
his religious conduct, &c., probably imported with the Christian religion
by the Greek Church, because at the time of the conversion of Russia, this
church had already introduced painted though not carved(127) images, to
which allusion has been made on p. 12 of this Essay.

CALVIN'S TREATISE ON RELICS, WITH NOTES BY THE TRANSLATOR.

St Augustinus complains, in his work entitled "The Labour of Monks," that
certain people were, even in his time, exercising a dishonest trade,
hawking about relics of martyrs, and he adds the following significant
words, "_should they really be relics of martyrs_," from which we may
infer, that even then abuses and deceits were practised, by making simple
folks believe that bones, picked up any where, were bones of saints. Since
the origin of this abuse is so ancient, there can be no doubt that it has
greatly increased during a long interval of years, particularly as the
world has been much corrupted since that age, and has continued to
deteriorate until it has arrived at its present condition.

Now, the origin and root of this evil has been