As another consequence, the Protestant priest has ceased to be a delegate from on high, the indispensable mediator between man and God, alone qualified to give absolution and to administer the rites by which salvation is obtained; he is simply a man, graver, more learned, more pious and more exemplary than other men, but, like the others, married, father of a family and entering into civil life, in short a semi-layman.

The laymen whom he leads owe him deference, not obedience; he issues no orders; he sentences nobody; speaking from the rostrum to a gathering is his principal, almost unique, office, and the sole purpose of this is instruction or an exhortation .-- With the Greeks and Slaves, with whom the authority of the Church is merely of a preservative nature, all the observances of the twelfth century have subsisted, as rigorously in Russia as in Asia Minor or in Greece, although fasting and Lents, which Southern stomachs can put up with, are unhealthy for the temperaments of the North.

Here, likewise, these observances have assumed capital importance.

The active sap, withdrawn from theology and the clergy, flows nowhere else; these, in an almost paralyzed religion, constitute almost the sole vivifying organ, as vigorous and often more so, than ecclesiastical authority; in the seventeenth century, under the patriarch Nicon, thousands of "old believers," on account of slight rectifications of the liturgy, the alteration of a letter in the Russian translation of the name of Jesus, and the sign of the cross made by three instead of two fingers, separated themselves and, to-day, these dissenters, multiplied by their sects, count by millions.

Defined by custom, every rite is sacred, immutable, and, when exactly fulfilled, sufficient in itself and efficacious; the priest who utters the words and makes the motions is only one piece in the mechanism, one of the instruments requisite for a magic incantation; after his instrumentation, he falls back into his human negativity; he is nothing more than an employee paid for his ministration.