the outset. The revolt aimed at
maintaining the ritual, yet the lack of priests to officiate
necessitated its abandonment. The defenders of the old faith found
themselves, at the first step, deprived of the means of practicing its
rites. A single bishop, Paul of Kolomna, had held out for the ancient
books at the time of Nikon's reform, but he had been imprisoned, and
perhaps put to death: at all events, he died without consecrating a
bishop, and the Raskol was consequently left without an episcopate or a
priesthood. Now, Oriental orthodoxy is not simply doctrinal in its
character, but, as M. A. Reville has remarked of Catholicism, "is, above
all, a method of establishing communication between man and God by the
medium of an organized priesthood, whose successive members transmit
uninterruptedly the divine powers which they hold from Christ;" and the
death of Paul of Kolomna snapped the chain uniting the Old Believers
with Christ, for ever depriving the schism of the powers conferred by
Christ on the apostles and essential to the continuance of the
priesthood and the Church.

The Raskol, so to speak, was stillborn. Unless they retraced their
steps, there were but two paths to take--either to admit priests
consecrated by a Church they had condemned, or to dispense with the
clergy, who alone could celebrate the rites in defence of which they had
revolted. There was little to choose between the two self-contradictory
courses, and each had its partisans. This first check split the schism
into two groups, whose hostility has not been allayed by the lapse of
two centuries. According to some, as Christianity cannot exist without a
priesthood, its complicity with Nikon's heresy has not deprived the
Russian Church of apostolic powers--of the _cheirotonia_, or right
to consecrate bishops and priests by the laying on of hands; and as
their ordination is valid, the schismatics have only to bring back
priests of the official Church to the observance of the ancient ritual.
To this it is answered that by abandoning the ancient books and
anathematizing the ancient traditions the sect of Nikon has lost all
claim to the apostolical succession, so that the established clergy
constitute no longer a Church, but the synagogue of Satan. All communion
with these emissaries of hell is a sin, and ordination by the apostate
bishops a defilement. The Oriental patriarchs have shared the heresy of
the Russian prelates by agreeing to their anathemas a