, asserted its possession of a soul.[007]

The struggle against the supervision and interference of the state
has gone with some sects to the length of refusing submission to
obligations imposed by every civilized country. The _Stranniki_
(wanderers) in particular boast of keeping up a ceaseless struggle
with the civil authority, and make rebellion a moral principle and a
religious duty. From condemning the state as the protector and
helper of the Church, they have come to cursing it for its own
tendencies and claims. Thus, the singular spectacle is presented of
the more extreme schismatics looking upon their native government
with the same feelings as were entertained by some of the Christians
of the first three centuries toward the pagan empire of Rome. To
these fanatics the government of the orthodox czars came to be the
reign of Satan and the dominion of Antichrist. Nor was this an empty
metaphor: it was a clear, determined conviction, and it still exerts
a strong religious and political influence upon the schism. The
Raskolniks could see but one interpretation of the overturning of
public and private order under Peter the Great, and for what they
regarded as the triumph of darkness: to them it was the coming end
of the world and the advent of Antichrist. The old customs, it
seemed, must carry with them in their fall the Church, society and
all mankind. For centuries the extremity of agony or of wonder has
wrung this cry from Christendom. After political revolutions and
disastrous wars, in the most enlightened countries of Europe, in
France and elsewhere, religious persons, in the panic of calamity,
have been seen to take refuge in this last solution for the woes of
Church or of State, and proclaim with the Raskolniks that the time
was at hand. But what must have been the state of mind in Old Russia
when the stunning blows of Peter the Great seemed to be dashing
everything to pieces? Even at the period of the liturgic reform the
fanatics had cried that the patriarch's fall was the harbinger of
the world's end. The days of man, they said, are numbered; the
Apocalyptic woes are at hand; Antichrist draws nigh. With the
accession of Peter the Great, while he was reducing everything to
confusion before their bewildered eyes, and trampling under foot the
old customs, along with morality itself at times, the Raskolniks
were at no loss to recognize in him the coming Antichrist. Nations
are not always clear-sighted: the cre