priests do the same when they receive the chalice, Bible, or any thing else from them ; and without the church, when the priests make state visits, the ladies kiss the hand of the meanest of them, on which account many carefully cherish a pretty hand, and decorate and perfume it when they pay these visits. These two occasions excepted, the priests enjoy no great personal influence or consideration. A priest's advice is seldom asked in family matters ; even the domestic chaplains in great houses are there to perform divine service only, and never penetrate into the interior of families, as the Catholic clergy do. The peasants with us know no better counsellor than their pastor ; but the Russian peasant, in cases of difficulty, rather turns to his saints' pictures, and invokes the sacrament rather than the priest who comes with it. One cannot help wondering how little the people in the streets or houses of public entertainment seem held in check by the presence of a priest. Rarely is one seen appeasing a dispute, or exerting any moral authority to restore order ; he passes on like any other indifferent person. Moral influence, indeed, they have Httle or none ; only with the saints in their hands are they feared or respected — only as directors of religious ceremonies — not as interpreters of the living word of God.
How much more the Russian people are devoted to their pictures than their priests was proved in the most striking manner in the reign of Catherine by an occurrence in Moscow. During the prevalence of an epidemic sickness the government had caused a picture of the " Varvarian Mother of God," one of the most revered in the city, to be removed and put aside in a church, to withdraw it from the frantic kisses of the people, who in thus supplicating for help only spread disease further. The affair caused a riot. The people broke into the church, and compelled the priests to restore the picture to its place. The government thereupon applied to the Metropolitan, who took it on himself again to remove the Varvarian Mother ; which so irritated the people that they fell upon the Metropolitan in the public streets, killed, and tore him in pieces. The priests naturally reap as they have sown. As they preach no lessons of reason or morality, they have no moral lever to put in motion ; and as they only inspire reverence in their magnificent pontificaHbus, little or none by theii example and personal qualities, the hem of their goldembroidered yepitrakhils are constantly kissed, while their brown every-day tunics, we are assm-ed, often meet with hard knocks. The government uses them no better. The temporal power sometimes makes considerable inroads on the spiritual without calling the priests to counsel ; and priests, like other public officers, are hable to hard reprimands and severe punishments. They may be sent to Siberia, or degraded to serve as common soldiers. The milder pmiishments are suspension from the exercise of their office, and degradation to the lowest offices in the church, or to the condition of ordinary monks. It is a well -known fact, that those who on leaving seminaries dii-ectly take orders as secular iriests, though they obtain livings more quickly, never rise to the higher dignities of bishop or archbishop. They serve either as diatschok and diakon, or if, after leaving the seminary, they enter some other s)i ritual academy, they may become popes Immediately. They have a right to marry like other men, but they may only marry once, and after the death of his wife a )rlest usually retires to a convent.
Those only who submit to the severities of a conventual life, and, reuoauclng the luippiness of marriage altogether, Uve only as half men, are
esteemed worthy of the higher spiritual dignities. They reach them by the several steps of novice, monach (monk), Aierowowac/i (chief monk), archi' mandrite (abbot), and so on. A nun is called monakhina, an abbess iyumena^ denominations all taken from the Greek. The higher clergy also take masters and doctors' degrees at the academies.