The face of the country improves as we get on. More trees, more hills, more culture, and signs of thrift on every hand.
Into the car came a venerable ecclesiastic of the Greek type. A heavy gold cross was suspended from his neck and hung on his broad breast; and his gray hair rested in curls on his shoulders. The scarlet and gold on his robes attracted the eye of the stranger, but he seemed to challenge no special attention from the people with whom he came in contact. We called him the Patriarch Nicon at once, for he came in upon us as at Krukova, which is the station where we would stop, if we had time to make a visit at the Monastery of New Jerusalem, or Voskresenski, which, being interpreted, meaneth Resurrection. This monastery was founded in 1657 by the Patriarch Nicon, whose story is told by Dean Stanley in his lectures on the Greek Church, and condensed into the travel books in the hands of wanderers in these wilds.
At this village of the Resurrection, Nicon, a patriarch of the Greek Church, was wont to stop in his journeys through the country, and in 1655 he built a church here, and the Czar of all the Russias did him the honor to come to its consecration and name it the New Jerusalem. Nicon obtained a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at old Jerusalem, and he made one like it here. He found hills and vales and brooks like those in the Holy Land, and gave them names to correspond, which they bear to this day, though two hundred years have since gone by. The river Istra became Jordan, and he made a little one for Kedron, and called a village at a distance Nazareth, and one nearer by was Bethany; and with these sacred associations he gathered around him the odor of sanctity, and with it came dreams of power and glory, such as priests are apt to have when they leave the service of God and substitute their own imaginings for the teachings of his word. The Czar saw what he was at, and soon let him down from his Jerusalem. The Patriarch began to claim civil as well as sacerdotal power. Just as the Bishop of Rome became a king as well as priest, so Nicon would sway a sceptre as well as a shepherd’s crook. He put stringent laws upon his inferior clergy, and they became restive under his authority. He rode into town on an ass in profane imitation of Christ, and the people could not see the sense of being compelled to cast their garments in the way of him who was so unlike the meek and lowly Jesus whom they would have loved to honor. His tyranny drove them to revolt, and many sects sprang up which even now continue to maintain their existence in the empire and in a certain hostility to the regular Greek Church of the empire. Nicon grew more and more despotic, as his enemies grew formidable in numbers and power. He seized in the houses of the nobles, wherever he could find them, all pictures not painted in the style that pleased his royal will. In all his dealings with them he claimed the authority of the sovereign. He was fast becoming the pope of the north. At last the Emperor, no longer willing to acknowledge the lordly assumptions of this proud subject, refused to honor his festivals with the royal presence, or to recognize the Patriarch as spiritual father. Nicon was enraged at this slight, and thinking to humble the Czar, threw off his robes of office, resigned his crozier, and retired to his monastery at Resurrection. The sepulchre would have been a more fitting place for retirement. Hither he supposed the Czar would hasten, and with apologies, penitence, and tears beseech him to return and resume his reign. He reckoned without his host. The Czar could make and unmake such ecclesiastics, and he put another man in his place, and left poor Nicon to chew the cud of regret in his ignominious solitude. He stood it six years, and then sent word to the Czar that, after long fasting and prayer, he had been honored with a vision of the prophet Jonah, in a dream, who had told him it was his duty to resume his seat on the patriarchal throne of Moscow. But the Czar could not see it. Jonah said nothing to him about it, and he had an idea that unhappy Nicon might, indeed, have had a great many dreams of the same kind, but that Jonah was not the man to make patriarchs for him. He called a council of Eastern patriarchs, presided in the midst of it himself, and this council came very naturally to the decision that Nicon should be degraded and banished to a monastery in Novgorod. The next Czar who came to the throne pardoned Nicon, who soon after died.
Such was the sad career of a great genius, whose brief reign was signalized by the aggrandizement of the Russian Church, for he magnified five patriarchates,—Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Moscow. And now his remains are lying in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he built, in the chapel of Melchisedek, at the foot of the Golgotha, and over his tomb hang the heavy chains which, to mortify his body, he wore around his person, while he put heavier chains on the souls of those whom he reduced beneath his ghostly power.
I think there is a lesson in the life and death of such a man, and that we may read in it the workings of human ambition and pride, even under the garments of holy offices; we see the conflict between church and state, whenever they are allied, and the doom that awaits the men who pervert the institutions of religion to their own glory and the oppression of others.
We are now approaching Moscow. Two thousand miles by rail we have come. The whole region over which we are now passing seems to be one dead level of lowly toiling, dreary living, without one sign of such enterprising life and energy as we would find in France or England, not to speak of that young world in the West, to which freedom seems to have taken her flight.
The train is moving slowly into town. We have come to Moscow. We are at the gates of the Kremlin!
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE KREMLIN AND THE BELLS OF MOSCOW.
M. BILLOT is a Swiss landlord, who keeps a good hotel in Moscow. He has a charming wife and family around him, a well-trained corps of servants, and makes his house a home for American and English guests. It is something for a weary traveller to find a home when he gets to Moscow.
I have but one fault to find with Moscow’s bed and board. Mind, it is not a complaint against mine host, M. Billot. It is the fault of the city, that it is full of fleas. We charged upon them with a flea powder, the second night of our sojourn there, but the powder about M. Billot’s pillows was as troublesome as the fleas.