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knew better than to disobey. Now, with the day’s

tragedy ended, Moskow prays in its churches.
A shudder runs through the crowd. In that little
porch at the right of the altar-screen there appears a
startling figure. With pale face and disheveled hair
and his rich clothes still spotted with the blood of
his murdered subjects, the Tsar too, has come to
church. The service goes on and the most devout
worshipper in the great room is outdone in pros-
trations and all the outward forms of devotion by the
solitary devotee in the niche beside the altar-screen.
In an agony of self-immolation he beats the agate
pavement with his forehead; his blood-stained hands
are incessant in the signing of the cross or the thumbing
of his jewelled rosary. If never before, surely the Tsar
repents him, now.
But the people have no such hope: it is no new
thing for Ivan to come to church; neither are today’s
orgies of cruel murder new. Tomorrow may see an-
other son forced as a prelude to his own execution to
witness the beheading of his father, or a hundred
more prisoners drowned in the river. Yet the Tsar
prays in the niche as though naught save religion could
find a place in his soul.
Only if we imagine ourselves living through some
such experience, can we truly appreciate the con-
dition of the State and the Church under this first Tsar
of all the Russians. Ivan reigned for fifty years
(1533—1584), the contemporary of the Borgias in
Italy and of Queen Elizabeth in England. He is
one of the most interesting studies in all Russian
history. A kingly administrator and a ruthless auto-
crat; a pious supporter of the Church and the most
abandoned of libertines; all the extremes the mind
can picture seem bound up in the one man. He ex-
tended and consolidated all the Russian territory from
the Soja in the west to unknown distances east of the
Urals. The Tatar Khans were crushed into hopeless