# The Greek and Eastern Churches/Part 2/Division 3/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII
RUSSIAN SECTS
Nonconformity is as important a feature of the history of religion in Russia as it is in England. But, except in the case of the more recent sects which owe their origin to Western Protestant influences, Russian dissent is very different from English dissent. The typical English nonconformist is an opponent of ritualism and a champion of liberalism. He represents the Puritan of the seventeenth century. But the typical Russian nonconformist is a martyr to a rigorously conservative ritual. Although there are now in Russia sects of an opposite character, the "Old Dissent" arose as a protest against the supposed innovations in the ritual of the Church introduced by Nicon's revision of the service books. It is known as the Raskòl (a Russian word meaning "division" or "schism"); and its adherents are called Raskolniks ("schismatics"). The movement, which originated in the seventeenth century, soon assumed vast proportions. It numbers 1,500,000 persons in the columns of the census; but many more belong to it who do not make this open profession for fear of persecution, and it is estimated to contain really some twelve or fifteen million members. These consist almost entirely of peasants, or persons who have sprung from the peasant classes. None are found among the ​upper classes, who look down on the Raskolniks with contempt. But not a few of them are rich men. They engage in trade, especially in money-lending. Sober, honest, industrious, thrifty, they are able to surpass the orthodox Russians in the competition of life. They are regarded by the peasants with the respect due to their character as the more religious people of the land. It is said that if you come upon an especially clean, well-kept cabin in Russia, the proprietor will turn out to be an old dissenter. The Raskolnik people have been credited with "erudite ignorance."
But the movement did not spring from any new spiritual awakening, anything like a revival, such as we see to have been the source of most of our English and American separate Christian denominations. It started purely in protest against new phrases and rubric directions, and these were not innovations on sacred originals, but corrections of verbal corruptions and changed usages which Nicon and the scholars who helped him regarded as marks of degeneration. Thus the supposed novelties were really reversions to antiquity. But this was not admitted by the ignorant peasants, and just as Jerome's Vulgate, which was a corrected Latin version of the Bible that Pope Damasus had ordered because the various popular versions were very corrupt, was nevertheless received with suspicion and hatred by the mutitude; and, as the English Revised Version has also been regarded by most ignorant Bible readers with dislike, so Nicon's correction of the service book was treated as an irreverent meddling with holy words and customs. The protest was pressed to the smallest minutiæ. Thus one writer says, "In such a year wiseacres commenced to say, 'O Lord have mercy on us,' instead of 'Lord have mercy on us.'" The Raskolniks were most insistent in holding to the incorrect spelling of our Lord's name as "Issus," instead of accepting Nicon's correction of it to "Iissus." But perhaps the most hated innovation, or rather reversion to antiquity, was the substitution of the ​sign of the cross with three fingers for the sign of the cross with two fingers. To accept this meant that children would have to unlearn a practice that had been taught them at their mother's knee. Such an unsettling of domestic religion was not to be thought of. On these and other grounds of the same nature, of which of course they found an abundance in a corrected version of the service books, the Raskolniks broke off from the ancient Church of Russia. It is their opponents who call them by the name that brands them with the sin of schism. The title that they take for themselves is Staro-viéry, which means "Old Believers"; they are the people who cling to the faith of their fathers. Yet deep as is the gulf of division thus caused, and bitter as were the mutual recriminations formerly hurled across it, there is no difference of theological ideas separating the two parties. Both hold to the only two standards of faith required by the orthodox Church—the Bible and the Nicene Creed; nor do they differ at all in their interpretations of Scripture or creed.
These old dissenters therefore have nothing in common with Protestantism. Their origin is in no way comparable with the contemporary rise of various sects in Western Europe. They are Russian of the Russians.
In course of time various influences led to remarkable developments among the "Old Believers" in very different directions. One thing, however, they shared in common: they were all regarded as schismatics, and therefore they were all not only denoimced by the Church but regarded with disfavour by the government. It was not forgotten that the corrections, or innovations, were introduced by order of the tsar and forced on the Church by imperial authority. Here then was a State violation of the customary order of the Church. The Raskolniks resented the innovations themselves, and they were indignant at the arbitrary and tyrannical manner in which they were made compulsory. It was natural enough that people should deem it a sacrilegious outrage for government officials to march into the churches, seize the venerated service books, deposit ​others in place of them, and by order of the tsar command the town and village popes to use the novel rubrics. Later on, when Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate and substituted for that semi-independent office his own nominated Holy Synod, and when the orthodox Church in Russia passed more than ever under the control of the State and its bureaucratic government, the dissenters who stood outside these movements came to represent to some extent the Free Church idea. They were not attached to the State; their services were not regulated by a government department.
The Raskol obtained new vigour from another source—popular resistance to Peter the Great's Western innovations. Here it was on solid ground. The European customs were novel to Russia, and many now rallied to the Old Believers. At first the movement had been confined to Moscow; now it spread all over Russia. Its flames were fanned by a breeze of prejudiced patriotism. Thus the Old Believers stood for Old Russia and Old Russian ways. They regarded Peter's novelties as portents of the approaching end of the world and advent of Antichrist. This idea of Antichrist bulks largely in the Raskol. Some perhaps identify him with the tsar; but to the majority who believe in his presence he is a mysterious personage existing somewhere in the world, to whose malignant machinations the corruptions of the Church and the troubles of the nation are due. Formerly some maintained that the true Peter, "the white Tsar," had perished at sea, and that a Jew, a son of Satan married to a German wife, had usurped his place. Hence this German invasion!
Old Believers were found objecting to everything in the way of European innovations. They objected to the change of the calendar; they objected to the change of dress—Peter's substitution of European costume for the Oriental gowns formerly worn by Russians; they objected to the practice of shaving. This latter novelty was regarded as distinctly heretical, disfiguring man who was ​created in the image of God and "likening him even unto cats and dogs." So serious was the objection felt to be, that Peter got Dmitri of Rostoff to write a treatise on "The Image and Likeness of God in Man," showing its spiritual character. It had little or no effect on the Old Believers. "The image of God is the beard, and the likeness the moustache," wrote one of these fanatics as late as the year 1836. There have been martyrs to the beard. In the year 1874 a recruit was punished with seven years' imprisonment for mutiny because he refused to be shaved. This is the Nemesis of image worship. The image worshipper can only conceive of God in the form of a conventional icon; and that form, with the bearded aspect of the representation of the First Person in the Trinity, becomes itself sacred in a man.
The old dissenters divided into two parties soon after the origin of the schism. The cause of this division was the extraordinary situation produced by a lack of bishops. In the days of Nicon only one priest stood for the old books—Paul of Kolòmna. This man was imprisoned for his contumacy, and when he died in prison there was nobody in all the Raskol who was competent to administer the sacraments. The difficulty which now stared the Old Believers in the face was entirely novel, quite without parallel. Other schisms in the Church which did not deny episcopacy had carried off bishops with them. Thus there were Marcionite bishops in the early Church who were able to build up a Marcionite hierarcy. On the other hand, the Montanists owed their very existence in great part to a protest against the root idea of an authoritative priesthood, and in this they were followed by the Protestant bodies on the continent, Lutheran as well as Reformed. The controversies that have been fought on the question of the consecration of Archbishop Parker may enable Anglican High Churchmen to sympathise with the perplexity of the Russian Old Believers. But the Russian dissidents had nobody that they could attempt to put forward on any ​pretext as a bishop in the apostolical succession. And yet they were extreme ritualists, with whom the validity of the sacraments depended absolutely on consecration by an episcopally ordained priest. Here was a dilemma of vital consequence to the life of the Raskol. How was it to be met?
Two answers of opposite character were given to the question thus suddenly raised and urgently demanding immediate settlement. One was that priests must be obtained, and this course was found more or less practicable in course of time by renegades from orthodoxy deserting to the Raskol. But the more uncompromising Old Believers refused to admit the validity of the priestly grace of men who had been in the degenerate Church, and who were tainted by their usage of the corrected service books. These people came to the appalling conclusion that there was no true apostolic succession left in the world, no valid priesthood at all. The holy fire on the altar was extinguished; and there was nobody left capable of rekindling it. The two groups were known respectively as the Popòftsky, or "priest people," and the Bef-popòtsky or "no-priest people." Subdivisions followed, so that the Raskol cannot be regarded as a sect or denomination; it is an amorphous mass of very divergent sects that are out of communion with the State Church.
The Popòftsky long laboured under the disadvantage of depending for its ministry on the precarious chance of desertions from the orthodox Church. At length this humiliating and harassing condition has been superseded by the establishment of an independent episcopacy, and the Old Believers of the priest party now have their own ordained popes. In the year 1846 they obtained a metropolitan in the person of a Greek, Ambrose, formerly a bishop in Bosnia, who had been deposed by the patriarch of Constantinople. This man joined the Old Believers and was accepted by them as their ecclesiastical head. Unable to live in Russia, owing to the attitude of the government towards the Raskol, he settled at a place called "White Fountain," in Austria, near the Russian border. The ​course was now clear for a complete organisation of the sect. Ambrose at once proceeded to create an entire hierarchy. But this was not accepted without demur by all the community. They stood for Russian isolation, Russia for the Russian. But here was a Greek living in Austria administering the affairs of the Old Believers. If there were war between Austria and Russia, what would happen? The position was most objectionable. Accordingly in the year 1868 a council of this branch of the Raskol was held at White Fountain; but it only led to an accentuation of the differences and left matters worse than before. The stiffer members of the priestly party refused to accept the newly imported priesthood, and preferred to go on as before relying on their chance to obtain deserters from among the priests of the orthodox Church in Russia. They could have no respect for priests of this character. Among the Old Believers the priests have a lower place even than that of the village popes in the orthodox Church. They are treated as mere hirelings, as men of no importance on their own account, only used to give efficacy to sacraments.
The Bef-popòftsy, the "no-priest" party, took very different lines. They organised a church without sacraments—excepting the sacrament of baptism, which could be administered by laymen. They met this anomalous situation in various ways. Some simply bowed to the inevitable, accepted the deprivation as a judgment of heaven, and waited for better times. They were like a Western people suffering from a papal interdict. This was the most obvious and sensible position to take up. It exactly agreed with the logic of the situation. But fanatics caricatured it ridiculously. Thus there were the "Gapers," who would stand on Holy Thursday with their months open waiting for the angels to feed them.
The most serious question which rose out of this anomalous situation was concerned with the sacrament of marriage. If all sacraments were now in abeyance owing to the absence of true priests to administer them, marriage was impossible, for this too was a sacrament. The recent ​contrivance of civil marriage was not then in existence, and if it had been, rigorous sacramentarians who were inclined to regard the government as Antichrist would not have submitted to it. Accordingly all marriage was forbidden by the no-priest party. Some understood this requirement of celibacy in a pure, ascetic sense, and anticipated the end of the world by the cessation of births. Others accepted it as an excuse for illicit connections, which, though they admitted them to be sins, they regarded as lesser sins than marriage by a priest tainted with the corruption of the orthodox Church. To some the monstrous position thus brought about became a horror which should be put an end to at any cost. There were child-killers, who sent young infants straight to heaven in order to save them from life in a world now subject to Antichrist. People, known as "clubbers," battered old men and women to death, quoting our Lord's saying, "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." One sect, known as the Philippoftsky, sought redemption by suicide. Whole families, whole villages, put themselves to death. The mania was propagated by prophets, who stood by to see that none shrank back in weakness from the universal self-immolation. Some of these people practised "fiery baptism," in plain words incendiarism and death by burning. A family shuts itself up in its cottage; brushwood is heaped about it; the prophet sets fire to the fuel; and the house and all within it are burnt. Then there were the Iskàleli Khristà—"Christ seekers," who went about seeking Christ and sometimes believed they had found Him in a prince, or perhaps a peasant. One of the most curious forms that the association of the idea of Antichrist with the tsar's government took is said to have been the veneration of the image of Napoleon secretly treasured in the home. There are to be found in Russia pictures representing the French emperor ascending to heaven surrounded by his marshals. It was rumoured that he was not dead, that he had escaped from St. Helena, and that he was in Siberia by Lake Baikal.
​Others, taking a more moderate course, but influenced by the same principles, fled from the contaminated haunts of civilisation and buried themselves in deep recesses of the forests. In 1850 Nicolas i. had the cells of the forest dissenters destroyed. The Strànniki, or "Runners," refused to have any fixed abode in this world of Antichrist. They were pilgrims and strangers, constantly running from place to place. Fortunately there were lay brothers living in the towns and villages and working at trades, from the proceeds of which the élite were supported during their peripatetic life. The Theodosians would not eat or drink with the profane. Another sect, the Pomortsky, were more liberal. They would not pray for the "imperator," for that would be to make the tsar Antichrist. But they would pray for the "tsar" under this more modest title. In the present day many of the Old Believers of the "no-priest" party are less rigid than formerly. They will permit marriage as a civil bond; but, since it is not a sacrament, they hold that its continuance is subject to mutual consent.
Too much importance has been given to the vagaries of the more extravagant sects which are not reckoned as part of the Raskol. Similar phenomena have appeared in America, and yet we do not regard them as characteristic of American religion. The same must be said of those who went into the opposite direction to the ascetics, and practised free love "on principle." The Shakouni or "Jumpers," the dervishes of Christendom, cannot be regarded as Christian at all if they are guilty of the practices with which they are charged. The performance from which they derive their name may be childishly innocent, although it borders on insanity and has no real religion in it. They stand in circles, men and women facing one another, and jump, panting, sobbing, shouting, screaming they jump higher and higher, each one striving to be the highest jumper; when the excitement is most intense they break up and take their own courses, some whirling madly round, others standing transfixed as in catalepsy. The common belief is that an indescribably shameless scene follows.
​The most amazing sect is that of the Khlysty, the members of which are said to have invented a horrible ritual for the Eucharist, from which in its normal form they are excluded by their Raskol tenets. They are said to hail an unmarried woman in their orgiastic dance as Bogoròdista, "mother of God," and to address her with the words, "Thou art blessed among women. Thou shalt give birth to a Saviour." If the young woman becomes a mother and her child is a girl, the infant is brought up to succeed as a new Bogoròdista; if it is a boy it is regarded as Christ. This Christ child is said to be killed at the altar and its flesh and blood eaten for the Eucharist. M. Leroy Beaulieu quotes several Russian authorities in support of these charges, which lead him to the conclusion that "there is much to show that these stories are not pure inventions." But we must remember that exactly the same things were said about the early Christian Agape by pagan adversaries, and everybody knows that the libels were absolutely baseless. Not long ago there were riots in Austria, in which Jews were murdered on the ground that they had killed and eaten a Christian child at the Passover. Again and again in the course of history similar charges have been brought against obnoxious sects. On the other hand, not only has a grave mass of testimony been brought against the Khlysty; but it must be acknowledged that in many parts of Russia the peasantry are extremely ignorant and little removed from barbarism. If these awful things are done even in the present day, they must be regarded as survivals of the dark vices of paganism among people who were never truly Christianised or who have relapsed from Christianity to practical heathenism. The Church cannot afford to hold up her hands in holy horror at these abominations; for it is the neglect of preaching and teaching, and the conduct of her services purely as ceremonies apart from spiritual thought and life, that have left the poor people to become the prey of evil influences. Nevertheless it is probable that the vilest of ​these practices, if carried on at all, are very rare indeed, and that some of those communities in which they were once found are now quite clear of them.
There is one sect, however, the nature of whose doings cannot be doubted. This consists of the Skopsty, the "Eunuchs," the members of which may be recognised by their pallid faces, thin voices, and unmanly bearing. Regarding marriage as impossible owing to the failure of sacramental grace, they aim at removing all difficulties in that direction by mutilating themselves. This is not done to them in childhood, but after attaining to manhood, when the operation is very serious. Some of them have children first, for the propagation of the sect. But they are found in two grades. There are some to whom marriage is allowed; and others, the elect, become eunuchs. The elect are credited with direct inspiration from God with the gift of prophecy, which issues in ecstasy. But in daily life they are the mildest and simplest of men.
None of these extravagant sects can be called Christian. They have attracted much attention on account of their eccentricities and owing to the sensational descriptions of them that have appeared in popular books. But they are not symptomatic of the Raskol or of religion in Russia.
Of an entirely different character are the movements carried on among earnest Christian people of high character, the very salt of the land. The most important of these Russian dissenters are the Molokans and the Doukhobors ("Spirit-wrestlers "). These two bodies have much in common, and their members pass freely from one to the other. They not only stand outside the State Church like the Raskol, but they entirely repudiate the hierarchical and sacerdotal system of the orthodox communion. They reject ​episcopacy and sacramentarianism, and they are altogether opposed to rites and ceremonies. Their aim is to promote spiritual religion by spiritual means. Both of them rely upon the Bible; but while the Molokans do so exclusively, the Doukhobors also appeal to the inward testimony of the Spirit. We may compare the one party with the Presbyterians and the other with the Society of Friends. They both call themselves Istinie Khristiane ("True" or "Spiritual Christians"). In their rejection of sacramentarianism they are the direct opposite of the Raskolniks, who are fanatics of ritual. "The Raskolnik," they say, "will die a martyr for the right to make the sign of the cross with two fingers; we do not cross ourselves at all, either with two or with three fingers; we strive to attain a better knowledge of God." These people reject all the characteristic forms of Russian worship, not only the repeated crossing of themselves by the worshippers, but the genuflections and prostrations (pokloni) which are so prominent in the religious observances of Russia. They will have nothing to do with icons. "God is a Spirit," they say, "and images are but idols. A picture is not Christ; it is but a bit of painted board. We believe in Christ, not a Christ of brass, nor of silver, nor of gold, the work of men's hands, but in Christ, the Son of God, Saviour of the world."
It is difficult to trace the origin of these sects. In the year 1689, Kullmann, a disciple of Jacob Boehm, was burnt at Moscow; in 1710 Procopius Lupin was condemned for asserting that the Church had lost the true spirit of Christianity; and in 1714 Dmitri Tvaritenev was convicted by a synod of spreading Calvinistic ideas. It is reasonable to suppose that Russian Protestantism had some connection with the Protestantism of Germany and Switzerland, which it resembles to a great extent; but this connection has not been definitely traced out.
The Molokans ascribe the origin of their movement to ​the visit of an English physician to Moscow in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, who introduced the reading and study of the Bible. It would appear that it is more owing to this Bible study by Russians themselves than to any direct Protestant evangelisation that they came to adopt scriptural ideas of Christianity. And yet the thorough protestantism of the confession of faith they presented to the government shows that the same ideas were in them that were working in the continental Calvinists and English Puritans. This confession concludes with the following statement: "Besides the holy sacraments, we accept the Word of God and inward faith as our guides. We do not consider ourselves as not sinful, nor as holy, but work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, in the hope of attaining it solely, and alone, through belief in Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, and the fulfilment of the commands of the Lord; we have no power of ourselves to effect this, but obtain it only through living faith in our intercessor and redeemer, Jesus Christ." Nothing could be more completely evangelical than that. Even the reference to the sacraments refers only to their symbolical character.
Mr. Wallace gives us an interesting account of the Molokans drawn up from personal enquiries among members of the sect. The results of the enquiries agree in the main with what we learn from other sources. They show that these people take for their model the early Apostolic Church as depicted in the New Testament, and reject all later authorities. They have no hierarchy and no paid clergy. Each congregation chooses one presbyter and two assistants, who must be men of exemplary life well acquainted with the Scriptures, and whose duty it is to take pastoral oversight of the religious and moral welfare of the flock. They meet on Sundays in private houses—church-building by heretics being forbidden—and spend two or three hours in singing, prayer, reading of Scripture, and conference on religious topics. A member will state some ​religious difficulty. The brethren then discuss the question and decide it by appeal to Scripture, which they know well and can quote freely. The moral discipline of this Church is very strict. It has been disturbed from time to time by the appearance of fanatical prophets, but its members have had the good sense to see through them and not to be led astray. Its numbers are considerable, perhaps amounting to several hundred thousand.
In the year 1814 one of the leading Molokans among the colony by the Molotchnaya was arrested for proselytising and thrown into prison. For the most part the Russian government has followed the example of the broad-minded Roman Empire in leaving each religious community undisturbed so long as it remained quiet and self-contained. Even the Church in Russia, with all the rigour of its boasted orthodoxy, does not trouble to follow the example of the Roman Catholic Inquisition and enquire into the private opinions of people, if those opinions are kept private. This nonchalance with regard to heresy is a natural consequence of an exclusive regard for ritual. Where religion is almost wholly an external affair, it logically follows that ideas count for little or nothing. But the case is altered immediately a heretic bestirs himself to spread his notions abroad, because the result may be not only to poison the minds of the orthodox, but even to lead them to break from the Church and its usages.
In course of time the colony at Molotchnaya became very much disorganised. Twenty years later (a.d. 1834) a government enquiry was said to have resulted in convicting them of abominable practices. But this must not be accepted as any real proof of guilt. There is no doubt that the Molokans generally are people of most worthy character. Still, Nicholas i. took advantage of the finding of the enquiry to order all people of both sects, the Doukhobors as well as the Molokans, to return to the orthodox Church on pain of exile. As they would not ​yield, he ordered them to be transported to the Caucasus (a.d. 1840). There the Molokans have built villages and become prosperous in their industry and thrift.
The Doukhobors have more mystical tendencies. Possibly they inherit ideas and influences from the Bogomiles, and so continue that tradition of Protestantism in the Eastern Church which was long cherished by the Paulicians in Armenia. As "champions of the Spirit" the Doukhobors are less bound to the letter of Scripture than the Molokans. Their doctrine of the indwelling Christ, so rich and fruitful when spiritually accepted, has been taken too literally by some of their people. Kapoustine, a distinguished leader of the body, gave prominence to the idea that Christ is born again in every believer, while he taught the immanence of God in all mankind. His theology was Adoptionist. God descended into Jesus and made Him Christ because He was the purest and most perfect of mankind. From generation to generation, however, this incarnation has been repeated. "Thus," Kapoustine said, "Sylvan Kolisnisk, of whom the older among you know, was Jesus; but now, as truly as the heaven is above me and the earth under my feet, I am the true Jesus Christ your Lord!" He was taken at his word and adored, for the Russian peasant is credulous. Such an aberration, however, is not characteristic of the community as a whole. It is merely a fanatical perversion of its central principle—a principle which it shares with the soberest of Quakers. The Doukhobors are abstainers from alcohol, non-smokers, and for the most part vegetarians. Communism is with them a religious principle.
The first known apostle of the doctrine of the Doukhobors was a returned soldier, or a German prisoner, who appeared at a village in Ukraina about the year 1740. Therefore the sect is more recent than the kindred body of the Molokans. They are said to have issued a confession of faith in the year 1791. By the end of the eighteenth century they had spread from Moscow to the Volga. ​Persecuted by the Tsar Paul on political grounds, many were exiled to Siberia.
In the year 1797 the Doukhobors were savagely persecuted with the knout, the slitting of their noses, imprisonment in small cells, and hard labour. The ground of this persecution was a charge of attempting to convert the orthodox to their heresy. Senator Laputkin wrote in 1806, "No sect has up to this time been so cruelly persecuted as the Doukhobortsi; and this is certainly not because they are the most harmful." Alexander i., being more tolerant of dissent than his predecessors, granted these people land near the Sea of Azoff. Unhappily a division took place among them in the year 1886, followed by a lawsuit, which resulted in the banishment of the defeated party to Siberia. A more unhappy episode in the history of a persecuted church has rarely been recorded in history. They had not profited spiritually by Alexander's clemency. But to their credit it should be added that the appeal to the law was made by quite a minority of the sect; the majority suffered for no fault of their own. Soon after this they experienced a religious revival. In recent days they have been persecuted—if that word may still be used—by the government for refusing military service. But in justice to the tsars it should be admitted that where conscription exists it must be enforced. The fault is in the odious system. This has led to the emigration of Doukhobors and the establishment of a colony of them in Canada.
The one Russian sect that is certainly an offshoot of Western Protestantism is the sect of the Stundists. It originated in the direct influence of a colony of German settlers near Odessa. Among these colonists wore some who called themselves "Friends of God," and met for the reading of the Bible during their leisure hours under a leader named Michael Ratuzny. Their principles were those of a simple evangelical faith together with the special ​tenets of the Baptist. In a word, they were German Baptists. These Teutonic emigrants were essentially missionaries in spirit, because they were genuine Christians. At first they only attempted to influence their neighbours morally and spiritually, without making any effort to detach them from the orthodox Church. But as Russian converts began to gather about them, these followers felt it necessary of their own accord to break away from the national Church and found independent communities. Thus the movement spread. From Odessa and the government of Kherson it passed on to the neighbouring provinces of Ekaterinoslaff and Kiev. The Stundists are a sober, frugal, industrious, intelligent, peaceable people, obedient to the laws, and exact in the payment of the taxes. They are said to advocate an equal division of the land, and they may have socialistic tendencies. But they have not tried to put these views in force by revolutionary methods. If the Russian autocracy had been broad-minded and far-seeing it would have welcomed the appearance of such a people as the best harbinger of the regeneration of the country. Instead of this the government has dealt with them harshly, breaking up their communities and scattering the individual members. This policy, the aim of which is to destroy the heresy, has had the very opposite effect. It has sown the seed broadcast. Every exiled Stundist is a missionary of evangelical truth in the district to which he is sent. Stundism is the only religious novelty that has appeared in the south of Russia. All the other schisms and heresies arose at Moscow or farther north or west. But, thanks to the policy of the government, this promising awakening of religious life is now to be met with in widely separated parts of the empire. It is spreading rapidly in the neighbourhood of St. Petersburg. Amidst the terrible troubles with which the realm of the tsar is oppressed, some see the greatest hope in this remarkable growth of an earnest religious life of a Protestant type.
A study of religion in Russia would be incomplete ​without some reference to Count Tolstoi (Leo Nicolayvitch), whose ideas are well known throughout the world. They are based on a literal insistence on the words of Christ as the law of the Christian life. This involves not only non-resistance, but the denial of any government by force, and the unlimited application of our Lord's direction to give to all who ask for help; the abolition of war, oaths, law courts, prisons and punishment, wealth and luxury; and the practice of universal brotherhood in peace and charity.
* ↑ The second "i" is pronounced soft like the η in Ἰησοῦς.
* ↑ Leroy Beaulieu, part iii. p. 299.
* ↑ Ibid. p. 305.
* ↑ Opus cit. p. 420.
* ↑ Said to be so named as "milk-drinkers" from their habit of taking milk and food prepared from milk on the fast days when it is prohibited by the orthodox Church, but more probably so called after the name Molotchnaya, a river in the south of Russia, in the neighbourhood of which they once flourished.
* ↑ Heard, Russian Church and Russian Dissent, p. 274.
* ↑ Ibid. p. 275.
* ↑ Ibid. pp. 276–7.
* ↑ Haxthausen, The Russian Empire (trans. by R. Farie, 1856), quoted by Heard, p. 276.
* ↑ Russia, new edit. vol. i. chap. xvii.
* ↑ Elkington, The Doukhobors, p. 147.
* ↑ Elkington, The Doukhobors, p. 243.
* ↑ Hence the name "Stundist" from Stunden, hours.