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In other words, the Raskol, when once freed from the authority which maintained the unity of the faith, was as powerless as Protestantism to establish any authority within itself. It has in consequence become a prey to the same license of opinion, to the same individualism, and, finally, to the same anarchy.
In like manner they interpret the double Hallelujah following the three Glorias, and cast it in the teeth of their opponents that they ignore in their ritual one or another of the great Christian doctrines. Such interpretations, based on corrupted texts or feigned visions, show the grotesque blending of coarseness and subtlety which makes up the Raskol.
One of the most numerous and powerful bodies in the first century of the Raskol, the Philipovtsy, or "burners," like the Indian fakeers, preached redemption by suicide, and salvation by the baptism of fire, holding that the flames alone could purify men from the defilements of a world which had fallen under the rule of Satan.
Their most dangerous enemy was not, however, the persecution of the dominant Church; they had placed themselves geographically beyond the reach of that: far more dangerous was further Raskol splitting among themselves, and it was not long before this overtook them.
Symbolism is the principle of its formalism, or rather the Raskol is symbolism run into a heresy. This gives it originality and value in sectarian history. To these extravagant ritualists ceremonies are not simply the garb of religion: they are its flesh and blood, in whose absence dogma is but a lifeless skeleton.
The innate logic of the Russian mind adds force to the kindred theological quality in its influence upon the Raskol, for the inhabitant of Greater Russia is distinguished for his logical consecutiveness and his acceptance of the extremest consequences of a position.
Thus practically the Raskolniki live in the same condition as in the time of Peter: they pay a tax and are not molested only the money paid does not now find its way into the Imperial Exchequer. These external changes in the history of the Raskol have exercised a powerful influence on its internal development.
But both Cossack and Starovere have found themselves forced to give way before the march of civilization, and the different branches into which the Raskol has split have reached very divergent conclusions both as to politics and religion. Nothing is more logical than religious creeds nothing more rigorously consequent in its deductions than the theological mind.
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 is begun is the fundamental doctrine of the Raskol, and particularly of the Bezpopovstchin.
The Russian, like the Mohammedan East of to-day and all other primitive societies, was most keenly sensitive to the burdens and vexations made necessary by this imitation of the European governmental system. From this point of view the Raskol was the opposition of a half-patriarchal society to the regular, scientific, omnipresent, impersonal system of European administration.
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