love
of independence, each little republic by itself; and their efforts,
however heroic, being without concert, gradually declined before the
vast force of the invader. In the region looking westward from the
Georgian frontier on the Euxine, on the one side of the Caucasian
range, and along the lower Kuban on the other, the Russian posts
are now seldom threatened but by small predatory bands; the natives,
retired to their mountain villages, have for some time made but few
more formidable incursions. The war is transferred to the region
spreading eastward from the Elbrus to the Caspian; where the strife
for free existence is animated not less by the hatred of Russian
slavery than by a fresh outbreak of Mohammedan zeal against infidel
invasion,--a revival, in fact, of that war-like fanaticism which made
the Moslem name terrible from the eighth to the sixteenth century.

It dates from the years 1823-4; at which period a "new doctrine" began
to be preached, secretly at first, to the select Ulema, afterward to
greater numbers, in word and writing, by one Mullah Mohammed, a famous
teacher and a judge (or _kadi_) of Jarach, in the Kurin district of
Daghestan. He professed to have learnt it from Hadis-Ismail, an Alim
of Kurdomir, highly famed for wisdom and sanctity. It laid bare the
degradation into which his countrymen had sunk by irreligion and by
the jealousy of sect; their danger, in consequence, from enemies
of the true faith; and urged the necessity of reform in creed and
practice, in order to regain the invincible character promised by the
Prophet to believers. The theoretical part of the reformed doctrine
seems to be a kind of Sufism,--the general character of which mode
of Islam, long prevalent in the adjacent kingdom of Persia, has
been described by our own orientalists. Disputed questions as to its
origin, whether in Brahmin philosophy or in the reveries of Moslem
mystics, cannot be discussed here; it must suffice to indicate those
points which appear to connect it with the hieratic policy that has
given a new aspect to the war in the Caucasus.

Proceeding nominally on the basis of the Koran, it inculcates or
expounds a kind of spiritual transcendentalism; in which the adept is
raised above the necessity of formal laws, which are only requisite
for those who are not capable of rising to a full intelligence of the
supreme power. To gain this height, by devout contemplation, must be
the personal work and endeavor o