the fortitude of Christian martyrs.  But, beneath all this, something immensely bigger was in progress, which can only be described as a conflict of two philosophies of life diametrically opposed or, if you like, a life-and-death struggle between two civilisations, so different that they can hardly understand each other’s language; it is a renewal of the Titanic contest, which was decided in the West by the Renaissance and the Reformation, the contest between the mediaeval and the modern world.  To the modern mind no period is so difficult to grasp as the Middle Ages; our dreams are of progress which is another word for process, of success which implies perpetual change, in either case of “getting on” somewhere, somehow, we know not where or how; our very universe, from which we have carefully excluded the supernatural, has become a development machine, a huge spinning-mill, and our religion, if we have one, a matter of “progressive revelation.”  We look before and after, forwards to some dim utopia, backwards to some ape-like ancestor who links us with the animal world.  Our outlook is horizontal, the mediaeval outlook perpendicular.  The mediaeval man looked upward and downward, to heaven and hell, when he thought of the future, to sun and cloud, land and crops, when he thought of the present.  He lived in the presence of perpetual miracle, the daily miracle of sunrise, sunset, and shower; and in the constant faith in resurrection, whether of the corn which he sowed in the furrow or of his body which his friends would reverently sow in that deeper furrow, the grave.  And his life was as simple and static as his universe; the seasons determined his labours, the Church his holidays.  Books did not disturb his faith in the unseen world, for he was illiterate; nor the lust of gold his contentment with his existence, for commerce was still confined to a few towns.  Russia to-day is in spirit what Europe was in the Middle Ages.[1] The revolutionaries offered her Western civilisation and Western philosophy, and she rejected the gift with horror.

[Footnote 1:  This, of course, by no means implies that she is behind the West, or that she is of necessity bound to pass through the same process of development.  The problem of modern Russia is not to imitate the West but to discover some way of coming to terms with Western ideals without surrendering her own.]

Will she continue to maintain this attitude?  “The Russian peasant,” says Mr. Maurice Baring, “as long as he tills the ground will never abandon his religion or the observance of it....  Because the religion of the peasant is the working hypothesis taught him by life; and by his observance of it he follows what he conceives to be the dictates of common sense consecrated by immemorial custom.”  The crucial point of this passage is the conditional clause:  “as long as he tills the ground.”  Of course, Russia, the granary of Europe, must always be predominantly an agricultural country; yet she is