I have heard, for instance, of one priest who was ducked in a pond on a cold winter day for the amusement of the proprietor and his guests--choice spirits, of rough, jovial temperament; and of another who, having neglected to take off his hat as he passed the proprietor's house, was put into a barrel and rolled down a hill into the river at the bottom! In citing these incidents, I do not at all mean to imply that they represent the relations which usually existed between proprietors and village priests, for I am quite aware that wanton cruelty was not among the ordinary vices of Russian serf-owners.

My object in mentioning the incidents is to show how a brutal proprietor--and it must be admitted that they were not a few brutal individuals in the class--could maltreat a priest without much danger of being called to account for his conduct.
Of course such conduct was an offence in the eyes of the criminal law; but the criminal law of that time was very shortsighted, and strongly disposed to close its eyes completely when the offender was an influential proprietor.

Had the incidents reached the ears of the Emperor Nicholas he would probably have ordered the culprit to be summarily and severely punished but, as the Russian proverb has it, "Heaven is high, and the Tsar is far off." A village priest treated in this barbarous way could have little hope of redress, and, if he were a prudent man, he would make no attempt to obtain it; for any annoyance which he might give the proprietor by complaining to the ecclesiastical authorities would be sure to be paid back to him with interest in some indirect way.
The sons of the clergy who did not succeed in finding regular sacerdotal employment were in a still worse position.

Many of them served as scribes or subordinate officials in the public offices, where they commonly eked out their scanty salaries by unblushing extortion and pilfering.

Those who did not succeed in gaining even modest employment of this kind had to keep off starvation by less lawful means, and not unfrequently found their way into the prisons or to Siberia.
In judging of the Russian priesthood of the present time, we must call to mind this severe school through which it has passed, and we must also take into consideration the spirit which has been for centuries predominant in the Eastern Church--I mean the strong tendency both in the clergy and in the laity to attribute an inordinate importance to the ceremonial element of religion.