orthodox priests
of Lesser Russia, many of whom, he said, "study the thrice-accursed
Latin tongue." He reviled them for their readiness to commit the mortal
sin of calling God _Deus_, and God the Father _Pater_, as
though the Deity could have no other than the Slavic name of _Bog_,
or the change of appellation involved a change of God. A like spirit is
evident in the resistance offered by the Staroveres to the correct
spelling of the name of Jesus, whom they persist in calling Issous,
rejecting as diabolical the more accurate form Iissous. Such
peculiarities show a nation shut up in its own vastness and isolated by
its position and its history. It is a kind of Christianized China,
knowing, and desiring to know, nothing beyond itself.

The revolt against the innovating patriarch was, in reality, a revolt
against foreign, particularly against Western, influences. Instead of
the accusation that he leaned to Romanism or Lutheranism, it would have
been a better representation of the real grievance to charge him and the
czar with borrowing from the West, not its theology, but its spirit and
civilization, and even this, perhaps, unwittingly. The outbreak of the
Raskol synchronizes with the introduction of foreign influence; and the
coincidence is not accidental. The schism was but the reaction against
the reforms which the Romanoffs carried out in so European a spirit. The
patriarch's enterprise has been sometimes attributed to his vanity or
his thirst for literary fame, but it was really the first indication of
the approaching revolution, and of a growing sympathy with the West,
where (as in England, for instance) at about the same period
analogous[006] reforms gave birth to similar disturbances. If the former
hermit of the White Sea invited criticism and learning to review the
ritual of his Church, it was only in obedience to the same
_Zeitgeist_ which under Peter the Great's elder brother, who
succeeded Alexis, was to found at Moscow a kind of ecclesiastical
university modeled on that of Kief. The Church, not less than the State,
felt the Western breeze that was rising on the Russian steppes. And, as
the Western spirit first attempted to introduce itself in the sphere of
religion, so religion confronted it with its most formidable barrier.
From the historian's point of view, the Raskol is that same popular
resistance to the introduction of Western novelties which under Peter
the Great passed from its original aspect of an e