Religion still the Key to History 235 property. Its principal functionary, IM. Pobedonostseff, was a con- servative of the conservatives, to whom the Orthodox Greek Church seemed the only thing that bound the many peoples of Russia into the Russian people. ' The creed of this church is medieval : of its teachings and influence Tolstoi has told, and the world believes him. The very month after the sharp words of the German Emperor, the Czar, against the protest of Pobedonostseil, decreed religious liberty ; and his subsequent convocation of the Douma was closely followed by directions to the Metropolitan who is president of the Holy Synod to call a general council of the Orthodox Greek Church. No such council had met since 1654. It can hardly fail to give a new direction to the religious Iffe of the mass of the Russian people. ' Already they have shown a new interest in what it stands for by a general inquiry for copies of the Bible. More parts of Bibles and Testaments were sold in Russia last year than in any year before, over half a million in European Russia alone. The fruits have not thus far made for peace, but they may be worth more than peace. -A department of the Holy Synod, until recently, as a bureau of " Spiritual Censure ", held control of all publications on ecclesiastical history, theology, or philosophy. Nothing could be published or sold, on these to()ics, without its permission. It is worth noting that from 1863 this bureau forbade the circulation of any part of the Old Testament exccj^t the Psalms, in the languages of the people. There was too much in the other hooks that breathed the spirit of revolution. It may indeed be safely said that no single cause for the spread of religious liberty and, by consequence, of civil liberty in modern times has been so powerful as the circulation of the Bible in all languages. It is to-day pronounced by publishers to be the best- selling book in the world.' The market for it has steadily broad- ened with and because of the new latitude of interpretation and criticism countenanced by modern churches. The last sixty or seventy years has indeed given to Christendom a new Bible. It is not that so very much has been discovered by ' .■liitohiogratliy of Aiidrerv D. While. II., chap. 36. ' Before these changes. Pobedonostseff and his school had relied on the pop- ular reverence for religion as the main support 01 autocracy. If there be such a thing as a religious stage of development for nations. Russia was still in it. The events of 1906 would indicate that reverence for her state church, at least, had been seriously weakened.
- The North India Bible Society, which is sixty years old, published and
circulated, between 1890 and 1900, a yearly average of 87,000 copies of Bibles, New Testaments, and selected portions of them. Since 1900 this annua! output has been nearly doubled, and the number rose in 1905 to 195,879. AM. HIST, REV., VOL, XM, — 16.
