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" I , John, am tsar and priest, up till dinner priest, afterdinner tsar, and I rule over three hundred and thirtytsars, and I am defender of the Christian OrthodoxFaith." Moscow became not only, as has been already seen(p. 89), 'the third Rome,' but 'the second Jerusalem' and'the second Noah's Ark,' the sole guardian and repositoryof true Orthodoxy; and Russia became 'Holy Russia,'signifying the ideal of complete and unconditional loyaltyto the faith accepted, a conception of orthodoxy somewhatakin to the orthodoxy of Communism. At the same time,while so strongly national, the Russian church continuedto maintain the Byzantine tradition of the oecumenicalchurch, a tradition of universalism which, long after thebreak-up of the rigid, ritualistic ordering of Muscovitelife, gave birth to, or could be linked up with, themessianic appeal that has been so prominent in Russianthought and feeling during the past hundred years.Russia never experienced the Reformation, but one ofits great results, the emergence of national churches, wasparalleled in Muscovy in the same period, and a secondgreat result, the secularization of church or of monasticlands, was nearly paralleled. The religious revival ofthe fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was accompaniedby a great extension of the wealth and the lands of thechurch, especially the monasteries, which contributedlittle to regular taxation and service. By the middle ofthe sixteenth century perhaps as much as one-third ofthe land was held by monasteries; they competed all toosuccessfully with lay landowners in attracting peasants totheir estates, and they played an important credit andfinancial role as being the largest possessors of readymoney.Hence there arose opposition to monastic landowningboth from' the laity and from a section of the monksthemselves, who, particularly in the northern communitiesbeyond the Volga, preserved the earlier ethos of themonastic revival. Led by Nil Sorsky (1433-1508),peasant-born, much influenced by Athos which he knewat first-hand, they stood for the purification of the churchby the abandonment of all, or a great part, of themonastic lands and by concentration on the moral and186