and atheistic. If the intelligentsia will abandon atheism, the chasm between the intelligentsia and the folk will be bridged over, and the disastrous apostasy in political, national, and religious affairs will come to an end. Bulgakov unreservedly accepts Dostoevskii's ideals, adopting that writer's explanation of the contemporary Russian crisis, and in especial Dostoevskii's explanation of the epidemic of suicide among young people, which is ascribed to the prevalence of atheism.
Bulgakov does not develop these ideas in detail, and plainly assumes that his readers will be familiar with Dostoevskii's writings. But he makes it sufficiently clear that the revolutionaries are to replace atheistic heroism by Christian heroism. "Seek humility, proud man," he exclaims with Dostoevskii; "return to Christ, return to Orthodoxy!"
The new path suggested by Signposts is thus a very old one, but this antiquity does not render the possibility of an agreement to follow it a matter of any less urgency.
It cannot be said that the detailed replies furnished by the liberals and the social revolutionaries did much to favour understanding and agreement, for they hardly touched the main issue, the ecclesiastico-religious problem; and moreover their treatment of all matters of detail was unduly abstract. Miljukov, for example, showed very well that religious evolution in Russia had been favoured by the influence of western ideas, but his conclusion was unduly liberal, if I may use the expression. To-day, said Miljukov, there are new possibilities of religious development. But we want to know, What possibilities? We wish to know, further, what part the liberal party has to play in this development, and what decisions the liberals must take upon religious and ecclesiastical affairs.[1]
§ 183.
IN the early days of the movement, liberalism was inspired by the spirit of the enlightenment, was rationalist, deist, freethinking. Liberals sometimes denied religion on prin-
- ↑ The liberal replies to Signposts were incorporated in a collection of essays published in 1910, entitled, The Intelligentsia and the People. Most of the writers were men of European reputation: Petrunkevič; Arsenev (literary critic), Gredeskul (historian), Maxim Kovalevskii, Miljukov, Ovsjaniko-Kulikovskii (historian of literature), Slavinskii (belletristic writer), Tugan-Baranovskii.
