much to do with this.  The mass of the people became Christians at the bidding of others, and with no sufficient preparatory instruction, without even having passed through all the stages of that polytheistic evolution from which other nations of Europe had emerged before their adoption of Christianity.  The religion of the gospel was, in its highest statement, too far advanced for the mental and social condition of the people; and so it was corrupted, or rather reduced to external forms.  Russia adopted merely the outside of Christianity; and there, even more strictly than in the West, it is true that the peasant was still a heathen.  Other nations have adopted the outside of a religion, and have afterward absorbed its spirit:  from its geographical and historical remoteness such an absorption was hard for Russia to achieve.  It was separated from the centres of the Christian world by distance and by Mongol rule:  its religion, like everything else, was debased by poverty and ignorance.  Theology, properly speaking, utterly vanished, and its place was taken by ceremonial, which thus became the whole of religion.  Amidst the general degradation a knowledge of the words and rites of public worship was all that could be exacted of a clergy which did not always know how to read.

The changes which had taken place in the traditional texts and ritual have little solid ground for the popular devotion entertained for them.  The liturgy was corrupted by the superstitious veneration paid it by the ignorant.  False readings had crept into the books which contained the various local “uses,” to borrow a term from the Anglican terminology.  Liturgical unity had imperceptibly disappeared amidst various readings and discordant ceremonies.  In course of transcription absurdities had slipped into the missals, along with grotesque additions and arbitrary intercalations, while the new readings were received with the respect due to antiquity, and these sometimes unintelligible passages acquired a sanctity in direct proportion to their obscurity.  The devout mind found in them mysteries and occult meanings.  On such perverted texts were erected theories and systems which pious fraud from time to time expanded into treatises attributed to the Fathers of the Church.  So wild was the confusion, and so palpable the alterations, that early in the sixteenth century Vassili IV., a Russian prince, summoned a Greek monk for the purpose of revising the liturgical books.  But the blind veneration of the clergy and people rendered this attempt abortive.  The reviser, Maximus, was condemned by a council, and confined on a charge of heresy in a distant monastery.  The crisis was superinduced by the introduction of the press.  Here, as elsewhere, the new discovery brought with it a taste for the study and revision of texts, and ultimately violent theological contests.  The missals which issued from the Russian presses of the sixteenth century at first only aggravated the evils for which they should have afforded a remedy.  The errors of the manuscripts from which they were printed received from these missals the authority and circulation of type.  The copyists had introduced countless variations, but these acquired a fresh unity and unanimity from the very fact of their publication in such a form.