tinue to occupy the energies of the reaction, under the aegis of the church. These labours were quite mechanical, and intelligence was practically superfluous for their performance.
As Leont'ev declared, the theocrats were opposed to everything towards which the nineteenth century aspired. Their primary aim was to forbid thought and culture, and to render these impossible. Philosophy, the sciences, the universities and the elementary schools, journalism, in a word, all the instruments of culture, were restricted. The new democratic trends and aspirations were crushed; socialism and liberalism, endeavours to secure liberty, equality, and progress, were strenuously opposed.
The theocracy had one of its main pillars in the aristocracy, in the great landowners. In this connection, the reactionary agrarian program of Russia may be said, in a sense, to have more justification than it has, for example, in Prussia, where the population is not predominantly agricultural. But even within the ranks of the Russian nobility there has always existed a liberal minority. The same remark applies to the army, the second buttress of governments and dynasties. To a certain extent, too, bureaucracy is perforce liberal.
There remains, then, the clergy, the altar, which is the most essential pillar of the throne. Theology is the true state philosophy of Russia, the official conception of the universe. Bakunin, in his earlier conservative days, formulated this in lapidary style for subsequent state philosophers and court philosophers, writing, "Where there is no religion there can be no state," and "Religion is the substance, the essence, of the life of every state." Pobědonoscev did no more than repeat Bakunin's formula when he declared, "Unbelief is the direct negation of the state." Surely it almost transcends irony that the founder of anarchism should have anticipated Pobědonoscev.
In Europe too, doubtless, conservatives and reactionaries appealed in political matters to divine revelation as the ultimate source of authority, appealed to divine right; but the divine right of the tsar was on principle elevated to the rank of a categorical imperative of revelation.
The struggle between religious faith and philosophical unfaith is not waged solely in the fields of philosophy and theology; it is at the same time a political struggle, the struggle between absolute monarchy and democracy. The Russian
