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ngth of the great popular movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the Streltsy insurrections at the time of the revolt of Pougatchef, whose excesses curiously recall the wars of the Peasants and Anabaptists in the West before the abolition of serfdom. In the great Russian Jacquerie, and in all the seditions which held out the hope of emancipation, the first place was taken by the Old Believers and the Cossacks, most of whom held the same faith. These two forms of national resistance are naturally akin. They equally personify the character and the prejudices of the old Russian. Their main point is their character of protests, so that an Old Believer may be described as a Cossack in religion, transporting into that domain the instincts peculiar to the wild horsemen of the Don. But both Cossack and Starovere have found themselves forced to give way before the march of civilization, and the different branches into which the Raskol has split have reached very divergent conclusions both as to politics and religion. III.--INTERNAL DIVISIONS. Nothing is more logical than religious creeds--nothing more rigorously consequent in its deductions than the theological mind. Religious thought has an unimpeded course in the twilight of mystery where it takes its airy flight, and no material facts avail to check it or divert it from the chosen path. The innate logic of the Russian mind adds force to the kindred theological quality in its influence upon the Raskol, for the inhabitant of Greater Russia is distinguished for his logical consecutiveness and his acceptance of the extremest consequences of a position. This is partly the cause of the multiplicity and growth of the strange doctrines prevalent among them; and while this disposition frequently lands the schism in the most grotesque of absurdities, it gives a remarkable unity and regularity to even its apparent divergencies and variations. Irregularity and the play of chance have as little real place in this spiritual phenomenon as in one belonging to the region of physics; and a knowledge of the _terminus a quo_ would have suggested its complications as well as the point ultimately reached. One is now and then tempted to look upon the various sects as utterly chaotic, but it is not difficult to trace the general course of their natural evolution. A less robust faith might easily have been cast down by the obstacle which confronted the schism at
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