the Scandinavian States it is the more significant that in all alike
rationalism is latterly common among the educated classes. In Norway
the latter perhaps include a larger proportion of working people
than can be so classed even in Germany; and rationalism is relatively
hopeful, though social freedom is still far from perfect. It is the
old story of toleration for a dangerously well-placed freethought,
and intolerance for that which reaches the common people. In Russia
rationalism has before it the task of transmuting a system of autocracy
into one of self-government. In no European country, perhaps, is
rationalism more general among the educated classes; and in none
is there a greater mass of popular ignorance. [1742] The popular
icon-worship in Moscow can hardly be paralleled outside of Asia. On
the other hand, the aristocracy became Voltairean in the eighteenth
century, and has remained more or less incredulous since, though it
now joins hands with the Church; while the democratic movement, in its
various phases of socialism, constitutionalism, and Nihilism, has been
markedly anti-religious since the second quarter of the century. [1743]
Subsidiary revivals of mysticism, such as are chronicled in other
countries, are of course to be seen in Russia; but the instructed
class, the intelliguentia, is essentially naturalistic in its cast of
thought. This state of things subsists despite the readiness of the
government to suppress the slightest sign of official heterodoxy in
the universities. [1744] The struggle is thus substantially between
the spirit of freedom and that of arbitrary rule; and the fortunes
of freethought go with the former.