It was forgotten that Russia did not consist merely of fifteen to twenty million human beings ripe for parliamentary government, but that it had one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty million peasants, most of them rude and uneducated, to whom the Czar was still the Lord’s Anointed, he whom God had chosen to direct the destinies of Great Russia. Accustomed from his earliest youth to hear the priest invoke the name of the Czar in the offertory, one of the most solemn moments in the Orthodox liturgy, the _moujik_ in his mystical exaltation was bound to attribute to him a character semi-divine.[53] The Czar was not the head of the Russian Church. He was its protector and defender. But after Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate the people were inclined to regard him as the incarnation of both spiritual and temporal authority. It was an error, of course, but it survived. It was this double aspect of the person of the sovereign which made Czarism mean so much to the masses, and as the Russian people are essentially mystic, the second factor was not a whit less important than the first. For in the mind of the _moujik_, autocracy could not be separated from Orthodoxy. The Russian revolution could not be exclusively a political revolution. It must necessarily have a religious character. When the old system fell it was bound to create such a void in the political and religious conscience of the Russian people that unless care were taken it would involve the whole of the social organism in its fall. To the humble peasant the Czar was both the incarnation of his mystic aspirations and in a sense a tangible reality, impossible to replace by a political formula, which would be an incomprehensible abstraction to him. Into the vacuum created by the collapse of the Czaristic régime the Russian revolution--in view of the passion of the absolute and the proneness to extremes which are characteristic of the Slav nature--was certain to hurl itself with a violence that no government could control. There was a fatal risk that it would all end in political and religious chaos or sheer anarchy. As the revolution was desired, preparations should have been made to avert this eventuality. Even in times of peace it would have been a formidable risk: to venture upon such a step in war was simply criminal. We Westerners are apt to judge Russian affairs by the governing classes with which we have come in contact--classes which have attained a degree of culture and civilisation equal to our own. We too often forget the millions of semi-barbarous and ignorant beings who understand the simplest and most primitive sentiments alone. Of these the Czarist fetish was one of the most striking examples.