on
which the Bezpopovtsy split. With marriage the family goes, society with
the family, and such teachings can never be in harmony with the
feelings, with society or with morality. Marriage is their
stumbling-block and the principal matter on which their discussions and
divisions turn, giving rise to the wildest aberrations and strangest
compromises. The more practical retain marriage as a social
conventionality, while the more logical make celibacy universally
binding, thereby fostering anything but asceticism. Among the Russian
sectaries the familiar combination is repeated of sensuality and
mysticism. Free-love has been both preached and practiced among them;
and among the lower classes the grossest heresies of ancient Gnosticism
have mingled with the wildest and most morbid of modern social theories.
Most of their theological writers, while avoiding such extremes, urge
the most extraordinary maxims in connection with their forbiddance of
marriage, such as that immorality, being but a passing weakness, is less
criminal than marriage, which is interdicted by the faith.... To such a
point as this have the conscientious champions of old ceremonial been
brought. They have carried with them a few shreds of ancient ritual, and
they have not only abandoned Christian and natural morality, but in
their struggle with modern government and civilization deny the
principle which upholds all society.

Even fanatics must stand affrighted before conclusions like these, and
the Bezpopovtsy feel the need of some justification for their subversal
of the _cultus_ and the morality of Christianity. They find but one
solution for the awful enigma presented by Christ's abandonment of the
Church and mankind, by the extinction of appointed sacraments and means
of grace, and by the impious rupture of the tie between man and God. The
downfall of Church and priesthood and the triumph of falsehood and wrong
were foretold by the prophets. This is the time predicted in Holy Writ,
when the very elect shall be wellnigh seduced, and when God shall seem
to give up His own into the hand of the Adversary. The priestless Church
is the Church in the state of widowhood foretold by Daniel in the last
days. Thus, the Raskol was brought by the new path of theology to that
belief in the approaching end of the world and the reign of Antichrist
to which we have already seen it led by its aversion to ecclesiastical
and civil reforms. That the reign of Antichrist