peasantry, of a corrupt and ugly church; the Russians are an agricultural nation, bred to the soil, illiterate as the savages, and having as yet no ambition to live in the towns; they are as strong as giants, simple as children, mystically superstitious by reason of their unexplained mystery.”  Russia is in fact 145 million peasants—­ploughing and praying.  And here once again one is reminded of the Middle Ages.  Cross the Russian frontier and you enter the mediaeval world.  Miracles are believed in, holy men are revered as saints, thousands of pilgrims journey on foot every year to Jerusalem, which is to every true believer the centre of the universe and therefore becomes at Easter almost a Russian city.  Russia is the most Christian country in the world, and her people are the most Christ-like.  The turbulence and violence, so contrary to the Christian spirit, which was an inseparable feature of mediaeval feudalism is absent from Russia; and the gospel of non-resistance, of brotherly love, of patience under affliction, of pity and mercy, which Tolstoi preached so eloquently to the world at large, he learnt from two teachers—­the peasant of modern Russia and the Peasant of ancient Palestine, who was crucified upon the Cross.

Yet it is a mistake to talk, as some do, of the power of the Russian Church, or of “priestcraft.”  The Church has little political power or social prestige.  It is the power of religion, not that of ecclesiastical institutions, which is the arresting fact about modern Russia.  It is not so much that Russia has a church, as that she is a church.  In England we have narrowed religion down to one day of the week and shut it up in special buildings which we call churches; in Russia it is impossible to avoid religion.  As you pass out of the gangway of the ticket-office at the railway station, you find yourself in front of a sacred picture with a lamp burning continually before it, and you are expected to utter a prayer before beginning your journey.  Every room in Russia has its eikon—­is in fact a chapel, every enterprise is sanctified by prayer and ceremony.  All English travellers in Russia have acknowledged this profound national sense of religion, and contrasted it with the religious formalism of the West.  “Italy,” wrote Mr. H.G.  Wells, on his recent visit to Russia, “abounds in noble churches because the Italians are artists and architects, and a church is an essential part of the old English social system, but Moscow glitters with two thousand crosses because the people are organically Christian.  I feel in Russia that for the first time in my life I am in a country where Christianity is alive.  The people I saw crossing themselves whenever they passed a church, the bearded men who kissed the relics in the Church of the Assumption, the unkempt grave-eyed pilgrim, with his ragged bundle on his back and his little tea-kettle slung in front of him, who was standing quite still beside a pillar in the same church, have