askol--Schism among the
Schismatics--The Old Ritualists--The Priestless People--Cooling of the
Fanatical Enthusiasm and Formation of New Sects--Recent Policy of
the Government towards the Sectarians--Numerical Force and Political
Significance of Sectarianism.

We must be careful not to confound those heretical sects, Protestant and
fantastical, of which I have spoken in the preceding chapter, with the
more numerous Dissenters or Schismatics, the descendants of those who
seceded from the Russian Church--or more correctly from whom the Russian
Church seceded--in the seventeenth century. So far from regarding
themselves as heretics, these latter consider themselves more orthodox
than the official Orthodox Church. They are conservatives, too, in the
social as well as the religious sense of the term. Among them are to
be found the last remnants of old Russian life, untinged by foreign
influences.

The Russian Church, as I have already had occasion to remark, has
always paid inordinate attention to ceremonial observances and somewhat
neglected the doctrinal and moral elements of the faith which it
professes. This peculiarity greatly facilitated the spread of its
influence among a people accustomed to pagan rites and magical
incantations, but it had the pernicious effect of confirming in the new
converts their superstitious belief in the virtue of mere ceremonies.
Thus the Russians became zealous Christians in all matters of external
observance, without knowing much about the spiritual meaning of the
rites which they practised. They looked upon the rites and sacraments
as mysterious charms which preserved them from evil influences in the
present life and secured them eternal felicity in the life to come, and
they believed that these charms would inevitably lose their efficacy
if modified in the slightest degree. Extreme importance was therefore
attached to the ritual minutiae, and the slightest modification of these
minutiae assumed the importance of an historical event. In the year
1476, for instance, the Novgorodian Chronicler gravely relates:

"This winter some philosophers (!) began to sing, 'O Lord, have mercy,'
and others merely, 'Lord, have mercy.'" And this attaching of enormous
importance to trifles was not confined to the ignorant multitude. An
Archbishop of Novgorod declared solemnly that those who repeat the word
"Alleluia" only twice at certain points in the liturgy "sing to their
own damnation," and a celebr