SPECIAL MENTION | AdventAI

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, February 12, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 7

SPECIAL MENTION.

THE LITTLE POPES OF RUSSIA.

The following stirring narrative, if it is a correct representation of facts (and for this we have no less an authority than the Pall Mall Gazette, from which it is taken) shows how absolutely the Russian people are controlled by superstition and spiritual tyranny, and the fearfully low state of religion in that country. It will be read with painful interest:—

Dimitri Sadenow is the pope of a parish in the diocese of Pauloslav,—a large parish, straggling over ten miles in every direction from the parsonage, and miserably poor. The two or three barines, or squires, who reside in it get no rents from their broad acres, and live by farming their lands as they can and distilling vodki. This does not prevent them from occasionally making handsome presents of jewelry to deck the images of saints in their church; for they are superstitious, and if Dimitri chose to work upon their fears by preaching to them when they were tipsy, he might extract bigger donations than he does. But Dimitri is an unbeliever, a wretched, bitter, disappointed man, who took orders without any vocation, simply because he was the son of a pope and because the Archimandrite of Pauloslav did not choose to release him from the obligation of succeeding his father, which, though not actually binding in law, is made so by custom. Some say that Dimitri was a wild dog at college—that he got into the Nihilist set, and used to subscribe to the book club which clandestinely procured Socialist periodicals from Germany. Anyhow, when the lad had turned his twentieth year, and was preparing for the profession of engineer, he got into some trouble with the authorities, and was requested to take his choice between expulsion and ordination. Expulsion from college would have meant enrollment in the army and compulsory service therein for twelve years; so Dimitri, gnashing his teeth, consented to abandon the scientific studies which he loved and to devote his mind to mastering the absurdities of Russian theology.

This was a heavy fall for a youth who had talent and a yearning after truth; but worse was yet to come. Dimitri was in love, and in submitting to ordination he begged hard of his Archimandrite that he might be suffered to marry the girl of his heart. In Russia, however, it has always been sought to make of the white or secular clergy a sort of Levitical corporation by compelling the children of the popes to intermarry. So the Archimandrite told Dimitri that an old pope had just died in the diocese, leaving three daughters unprovided for, and that it would be seemly on his part to make his selection from among these three maidens. Dimitri, in his despair, chose the ugliest and most cross-tempered. He had no option about marrying or remaining single, for a pope is bound to marry; and he can only hold his benefice so long as his wife lives. When she dies, he may not marry a second time, but must resign his cure and become a monk—a hopeless monk, too; for, although all the dignitaries of the church are chosen from among the black or regular clergy, it is only the celibate monks who can aspire to honors. A widower has simply to resign himself to a life of idleness and of swindling by selling sham relics to simpletons—at least, if he wants to live comfortably. Thus, on the whole, Dimitri Sadenow settled into clerical life with a miserable prospect. He did not love his profession, his wife, nor his bishop; just to put too fine a point upon it, he would have consigned all three to perdition if he had believed in perdition, but he did not.

Dimitri had just enough consciousness to be thoroughly wretched in the career which fate had marked out for him. He found out, in the first place, that he was not receiving the amount of salary that was his due. There are 36,000 parishes in Russia, and the budget of the Public Worship Department amounts to £5,000,000 a year. This sum, distributed equally among the parishes, should give each £140 a year for the payment of a pope, a deacon, and two clerks. But it is in the interest of the bishops to keep the establishment of deacons and clerks undermanned, so that they may draw the salaries of these officers; and, in fact, Dimitri Sadenow received but £30 a year, though he was expected to fill up a yearly schedule stating that he had a deacon and two clerks, and was receiving the regular rates of pay for them. The first time that he had to sign this paper Dimitri rebelled, and made a marginal note to the effect that he was discharging alone the multifarious duties of his parish; but hereupon the Archimandrite sent a police officer to warn him that he must fill up his schedule as per order, and not according to fancies of his own, seeing that the number of deacons and clerks requisite in a parish depended upon the bishop himself and not upon individual popes. Dimitri took the hint, but soon he found himself in another dilemma; for one of the barines in his parish came to him with a request that he would undertake the sale of vodki among his parishioners on receipt of the usual commission. Now, Dimitri loathed vodki, both for himself and for others; but when he said as much to the barine, the latter was greatly shocked, and asked him whether it was seriously his intention to hinder native industry and to diminish the Czar’s taxes. The revenue, as he pointed out, was swelled chiefly from the returns of the excise officers; and it had been the custom among popes from time immemorial to recommend vodki to their parishioners as a grateful cordial, and to levy a percentage on the barrels of that liquor that were sold directly from the vestry or at the publican’s. Dimitri’s wife, who was present (at the keyhole) during their colloquy, broke out into a storm of invective when the barine was gone, and shrilly reminded her husband that she—a pope’s daughter—had thought it no disgrace to sell vodki, and that she did not see why her husband should have any scruples, since it was impossible that a pope could eat cabbage-soup daily and rear up a family on £30 a year.

Poor Dimitri, as usual, had to give in. He promised to sell spirits, and did so; but next there came to him a plausible bagman who had relics to sell, and who wanted Dimitri to preach a whole series of sermons on a certain shin-bone, which he avowed to be that of St. Isaac, and most potent in curing rheumatism, love-pangs, and colds in the head. Dimitri laughed outright. As a man of science he had recognized the alleged human shin-bone to be simply the femur of a four-legged animal, and he requested the bagman to go elsewhere with his blasphemous trumpery. Thereupon the bagman looked grave and tugged Dimitri mysteriously by the sleeve. “Look here, pope,” said he, “your bishop has given his voucher for this bone, and I have paid him 200 rubles for doing so; if now you venture to make sport of it, it’s a matter of heresy, nothing less.” Dimitri looked at the bone, pressed it to his heart, and walked off. He was beginning to learn prudence—not so much because he was afraid of his bishop as because he dreaded his wife. On the following Sunday he preached a grand sermon about the bone, and received a fee from the bagman in reward for his eloquence. He would have liked to pitch the money into the fire, but the wife of his bosom secured it before it had had time to reach his waistcoat pocket; and the same thing happened with respect to the consignment of relics which the bagman had left, and which were all bought up within a few days like bread in famine-time. It smote Dimitri to the heart that he had to recommend these impostures and get money for them; but he was no longer a free agent, and his conscience had become a thing of naught, rubbed away between conflicting interests.

One day a Nihilist agent called upon him, and asked him whether he would sell a few tracts. Dimitri’s feelings would have prompted him to cry out, “Yes, with all my heart!” but he was already so trained to cautious ways that he merely held out his hand and said, “My fee will be ten rubles.” The sum in question having been paid, Dimitri promised that he would try to dispose of the seditious literature, and he has kept his word. He is now what one may call a priest in full practice. He sells vodki; he scatters religion with one hand and Nihilism with the other. Dressed in his canonicals, he looks holy as the saints in illuminated missals, but within he is all full of rageful thoughts; and if a revolution occurred, he would be first to set fire with his own hands to that gaudy parish church of his, which is stocked to overflowing with offerings, which recall to his mind the degrading superstitions of the people among whom he lives, and force his reason to revolt against the profession which he exercises.