ideas. Having had the Bible from the first in the vernacular she had no such experience as that which resulted from its translation into English and German, and the consequent popularising of Scripture as a long lost treasure gladly recovered. Lastly, she had no Luther, no Zwingli, no John Knox. On the other hand, in justice to the Sclavonic race represented by Russia, it should be remembered that John Huss was a Sclav; and in some respects John Huss was the parent as he certainly was the precursor of the Reformation on the Continent. Originating in an Englishman, Wycliffe, the first of the reformers before the Reformation, it passed through Huss the Bohemian into Germany, and so came back from the Sclav to the Teuton again.
Now, though Russia did not need reformation to the extent that was requisite in Europe, because she was not suffering from the specific corruptions of the Roman Church at the end of the Middle Ages, she had her own superstitions derived from a still earlier period, in the magical value attached to icons and relics by the mass of the people, as well as what some would consider to be the errors of both branches of the Church in their departure from the primitive type. At all events, in so far as the Reformation, over and above its Iconoclasm, was a religious awakening, to Protestants it must be a matter of regret that Russia had no share in it. The common habit of treating the Western Church as though it were the whole Church has resulted in regarding the Reformation as a movement stirring Christendom to its depths, instead of which it was simply a Western movement. Great churches occupying vast areas of Europe, Asia, and Africa, were quite outside its range, being neither scourged by the evils against which it protested nor favoured with the factors of its new life.
The consolidation of the Russian Empire under Ivan iii. and his successors was accompanied by quite another stimulus to devotion. In the West the year 1000 had been anticipated with terror as the destined date of the
