gainst the ancient
rites, and orthodoxy has carried with it in its fall the episcopate,
apostolical succession and the lawful priesthood.

Thus, in the first generation the Raskol fell into two sections--the
_Popovtsy_, who adhere to the priests, and the _Bezpopovtsy_,
who do not. To recruit their clergy the Popovtsy were fain to have
recourse to deserters from the established Church, and were thus
dependent upon it; though we shall see that of late they have succeeded
in getting an independent episcopate along with a complete
ecclesiastical hierarchy. By maintaining a priesthood, however scanty
and ignorant, the Popovtsy preserve the sacraments and the orthodox
Christian system; and, despite the inconsistency of admitting the
priests of a Church that they condemn, they have paused at the first
step of schism and maintain the original position. It is almost
impossible, on the other hand, for the Bezpopovtsy to stop on the slope
down which their logic inexorably drags them. Involved in the
abandonment of the priesthood is that of orthodoxy, or at least of the
orthodox ritual, and the sacrament of orders carries with it the
sacraments which none but the priest can administer. Of the seven
traditional channels of divine grace, baptism alone remains open: the
other six are dried up for ever. Thus, the first step of the Bezpopovtsy
brings them to the destruction of the first principle of Christian
worship. The more rigid of them do not shrink from this most glaring of
contradictions. To save the entire ritual they have sacrificed its most
essential parts. For the double Hallelujah and the sign of the cross
with two fingers instead of three they have foregone the whole Christian
life and the one visible link between man and God, which is to be found
only in the sacraments. The abolition of the sacred ministry and divine
service is their protest against the trifling changes introduced into
their devotional customs by the established Church. In barring the
entrance to Nikon's so-called innovations they have done away with the
priesthood, and so with every dyke against sectarian whimsies or the
very novelties against which they blindly contend.

In the melancholy upshot of the Bezpopovtsy movement there was nothing
to satisfy the fondness for ceremonial and tradition to which the schism
owed its birth; and it was hard to fill the gap left by the loss of
priesthood and sacraments. The old orthodox law had become impossible to
c