THE POPE AND THE CZAR.
THE Daily Telegraph of Thursday contained an inter- esting, and, taken by itself, a puzzling, telegram from St. Petersburg. "The Governor-General of Warsaw is about," it said, "to resign his post owing to a dispute with the superior Catholic clergy there." There have been times when this news would have had the very opposite meaning to that which it now appears to bear,— times when it would have meant that the Governor- General had not shown sufficient firmness in his dealings with the ministers of a creed which in Russian eyes has been immemorially associated with rebellion, times when such a recall would have implied the Imperial displeasure with a subordinate who had shown undue tenderness towards the professors of an alien and hostile religao.n. Some of the least creditable incidents of Russian adminis- tration have been those connected with the Polish Catholics, and standing alone, this news might have meant that the religious peace which Poland has lately enjoyed—speaking comparatively—is to be disturbed by a return to older and harsher methods. But the tele- gram goes on in terms which are altogether novel. " The !call of Prince Imeretinsky will be made in order to ive pleasure to the Papal Court, with which the St. Petersburg Cabinet is entering into the best relations." his is the explanation of the change in the personnel of le Warsaw Administration. Unlike any that have gone efore, it means not greater severity but greater mildness, is introduction of a wholly new system, not the return ) one that had been in part abandoned. It is easy to nderstand that new measures require new men, that ficials who have been accustomed to deal severely with rery manifestation of a rebellious spirit, and. to see ridence of that spirit in acts and words which might ith at least equal reason have been regarded as harm- as, are not the instruments for the conduct of an untried xperiment. But though from this point of view the call of Prince Imeretin sky is intelligible, we are still face ) face with the inquiry why this new policy is being dopted, why the traditional attitude of the Russian /ovemment towards its Catholic subjects has been eparted from, why the St. Petersburg Cabinet is addenly anxious "to give pleasure at the Papal Court." The remarkable letter which we print elsewhere sup- lies an answer to all these questions. Mr. Palmer reminds a that in Russia "the spirit that animated the Crusaders B still a living force " ; that "a pilgrimage to the Holy 'and is, in the belief of the vast majority of Russians, he supreme act of the national faith"; that wherever her in- tuella) extends Russia "has spared no efforts to secure con- vrts to the Orthodox Church "; that under the patronage )f the Imperial family the Orthodox Society of Palestine has long been engaged in the erection of Russian hurches and monasteries," in founding schools "for the %tension of the Russian language and creed," in con- Tying peasant pilgrims to Palestine at a total cost of less ,han five pounds, or for nothing if the pilgrims are chosen o represent a village and are too poor to find even this nodest sum. Englishmen are too much wont to suppose hat religious devotion is as weak in other countries as it cems to be in their own. They forget that it is the ;overning emotion of the Russian peasant's life. To him he Czar is the anointed ruler whom God has set up for he defence and extension of the Orthodox Church. It is his sacred character that lies at the foundation of the vverence they feel for him, and to show any disregard or the interests and conquests of the Orthodox Church rould be to defy the only public opinion that is a real and rital force in Russia. It must be remembered, moreover, hat the "conquests" of the Orthodox Church are re- x:Inquests. The Turk is in possession of regions that were ince the very cradles of the faith, and, though the Russian leople have been schooled for centuries to wait in patience or the time when Holy Russia shall re-enter the tern- ones that were once subject to the Eastern Empire and re still the sanctuaries of Eastern Christianity, they ronld think the Czar who put away from him the pros- Oct of their eventual recovery an apostate from the faith e professes. Apart from all the material considerations inch weigh with the Western and modern world, and ount, we may be sure, for just as much at St. Petersburg s elsewhere, the Eastern advance of Russia is, from e point of view of religion, a matter of high policy. The .zars could not give it up if they would, and with the tweet part of the Asiatic Continent lying at their doors ley have no reason for wishing to give it up. But what has all this to do with a. change of system in eland? Mr. Palmer will tell us. Russia is not the ,aly Power that is keenly interested in Eastern affairs. r9ce—Republican France, Radical France, the France to Inch clericalism is the enemy—has been busy for more Ian a generation in spreading her mission in Palestine, in Tna,.in Egypt. No matter what have been the religious anti-religious opinions of her Ministers, no matter how isy her Legislature and her Executive may have been in Anecating Catholics in France, they have one and all been 183' In helping Catholics in the East. In this way rauFe has been an active and dangerous rival to the Liman propaganda. Politics and religion lie very close gether in the East, and wherever there has been a htholic mission or a Catholic school there has been anti-Russian influence at work. That this mutual doney should be removed has suddenly become of vast P.ortance to both Governments. "The visit of the user has effected in a few days what all the efforts of Vatican could not have accomplished in as many centuries. Separate still on points of dogma, they are now perforce closely united in face of the common enemy." The German Emperor has come in as a third candi- date for a part of the great prize which Russia has long regarded as her own, and France has long sought to halve with Russia ; and in presence of the new corner the old rivals have made up their quarrel. At least the two Governments have made up their quarrel. But to make this peace embrace the Churches as well as the Governments something more was wanted. "Not even the political alliance of France and Russia" has been able to remove "the mutual jealousy between the mis- sionaries of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches." The difficulty does not lie on the side of the Russians. The Orthodox Church is not naturally a proselytising Church. When it becomes so it is at the instance of the Orthodox Czar, and it only needs his authority to be exerted in the opposite direction to ensure ecclesiastical obedience. On the Roman Catholic side the only power that can intervene to any good purpose is the Pope, and the end that the Russian Government had to compass was the making the Pope a party to the new understanding between Russia and France.
The Pope, we can readily believe, has been a willing convert. He has already shown his wish that the old claim of France to a protectorate of the Latin Christians in the East should not be treated as extinct, and though he has foregone the expression of this wish in deference to the remonstrances of the German Catholics, he is still at liberty to regulate as he pleases the relations between his own clergy in the East and their Orthodox neigh- bours. Moreover, he has every motive for coming to terms with the Czar. There is first the fact that the Czar has it in his power to remove all the disabilities under which the Polish Catholics have so long suffered. Nowhere in Europe in the present century has religious persecution been more active than in Poland, and though, as in the time of our own Elizabeth, religion and politics have been so interwoven that it has always been possible to plead that it is rebellion, not religion, against which the hostility of the State has been directed, it still remains true that, whether in their political or in their religious capacities, the Polish Catholics have lived very hard lives. It is an immense triumph for Leo XIIL that this long agony should come to an end in his pontificate. That the conclusion of a religious peace in Poland should also be the means of consolidating French influence in the East— French influence in the East being always and necessarily a Catholic influence—is an additional recommendation in the Pope's eyes. He has always had a special love for France, and has borne from her far more than he would have borne from any other Power. And though he is officially op- posed to any aggrandisement of the Russian schism, he may well think that the spread of German influence in the East is likely to do far more harm to Catholicism than all the efforts of the Orthodox Church. Against these solid and far-reaching arguments there is only to be set the displeasure of the German Emperor. But that displeasure cannot do him much harm unless it were to lead to a renewal of the Sulturkampf. On that head, however, he may reasonably feel easy. A coolness between Berlin and. the Vatican does not necessarily mean a coolness between the Emperor and his Catholic subjects, and in the present position of German politics he is not likely wantonly to provoke a quarrel with "the party that governs."
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