ts growth that in all its phases it is its own
best interpreter, and if confined to an isolated continent, its
development would have been the same. The Raskol is the most national of
all the religious movements to which Christianity has given birth, and
at the same time the most exclusively popular. It took its rise, not in
the schools, nor in the monasteries, but in the mujik's hovel and in the
shop; and it has never spread beyond its birthplace. Hence, the student
of politics and the philosopher take a keener interest in ignorant
heresies than is to be found in their doctrines alone. These sects of
lately-liberated peasants claim an attention by no means due to their
meagre theology, from their being the symptom of a mental condition and
a social state for even a distant approach to which all Western Europe
would be scoured in vain.

The Raskol (schism) is neither a sect nor a group of sects. It is,
rather, an aggregate of doctrines and heresies, which are often
divergent or even contradictory, with no other tie than a common
starting-point and a common hostility to the official orthodox Church.
In this respect the Raskol is more nearly analogous to Protestantism
than to anything else. It is inferior to Protestantism in the numbers
and education of its adherents, but it almost equals it as regards the
variety and originality of its developments. Further the likeness cannot
be fairly said to go. In the midst of their unfilial revolt, German
Protestantism and the Russian Raskol preserve alike the signs of their
origin, the stamp (so to speak) of the Church whence they have issued,
as well as of the widely-differing states of society which gave them
birth. In Western Europe love of speculation and a critical spirit gave
rise to the larger part of modern sects, while in Russia they are the
offspring of reverence and unenlightened obstinacy. In the West, the
predominance of feeling over the value attached to the externals of
religion has been the cause of religious divisions, whereas the same
result has been produced in Russia by an extraordinary reverence for
external forms for ritual and ceremonial. The two movements thus seem to
be in absolutely opposite directions, but they have nevertheless
terminated at the same point. In other words, the Raskol, when once
freed from the authority which maintained the unity of the faith, was as
powerless as Protestantism to establish any authority within itself. It
has in consequenc