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Updated: May 5, 2025
To one of the Bezpopovtsy sects the name of "gapers" is given, because they are accustomed to keep their mouths open during the Maundy-Thursday service, that the angels, God's only remaining ministers, may give them drink from an invisible chalice, since, as they hold, Christ cannot have wholly deprived the faithful of the flesh and blood offered upon the cross.
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.
Such are the expedients of the more gentle or enthusiastic to escape from the religious vacuum into which schism has precipitated them. Quite different is the course of the more strict and dauntless theologians; and the ascendency of logic over pious feeling carries with these the majority of the Bezpopovtsy.
Meanwhile, the faithful are like men shipwrecked on a desert island without a priest among them. Eucharist, penitence, chrism, and, more than all, marriage, are alike impossible. The priest alone can pronounce the nuptial benediction; and where there is no priest there can be no marriage. Such is the ultimate consequence of the schism the rock on which the Bezpopovtsy split.
The Oriental patriarchs have shared the heresy of the Russian prelates by agreeing to their anathemas against 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.
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.
All of the Raskolniks, or even of the Bezpopovtsy, however, do not agree as to Antichrist; for while his reign is generally admitted, it seems to be very differently understood.
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 carry out, yet it had not been abrogated.
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.
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