Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/172

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Nor was a fanatical adhesion to the mere letter of the sacred text confined to western Europe. About the middle of the seventeenth century, in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the Great, Nikon, Patriarch of the Russian Greek Church, attempted to correct the Slavonic Scriptures and service-books. They were full of interpolations due to ignorance, carelessness, or zeal, and in order to remedy this state of the texts Nikon procured a number of the best Greek and Slavonic manuscripts, set the leading and most devout scholars he could find at work upon them, and caused Russian Church councils in 1655 and 1666 to promulgate the books thus corrected.

Straightway great masses of the people, led by monks and parish priests, rose in revolt. The fact that the revisers had written in the New Testament the name of Jesus correctly, instead of following the old wrong orthography, aroused the wildest fanaticism. The monks of the great convent of Solovetsk, when the new books were sent them, cried in terror: "Woe, woe! what have you done with the Son of God?" They then shut their gates, defying patriarch, council, and Czar, until, after a struggle lasting seven years, their monastery was besieged and taken by an imperial army. Hence arose the great sect of the "Old Believers," lasting to this day, and fanatically devoted to the corrupt readings of the old text.[1]



    Opera, edit. Bretschneider, vol. xx, pp. 665 et seq. In the White Library of Cornell University will be found an original edition of the book with engravings of the monster. For the Mönchkalb, see Luther's works as above, vol. xix, pp. 2416 et seq. For the spirit of Calvin in interpretation, see Farrar, and especially H. P. Smith, D. D., Inspiration and Inerrancy, chap, iv, and the very brilliant essay forming chap, iii of the same work, byL. J. Evans, pp. 66 and 67, note. For the attitude of the older Church toward the Vulgate, see Pallavicini, Histoire du Concile de Trente, Montrouge, 1844, torn, i, pp. 19, 20; but especially Symonds, The Catholic Reaction, vol. i, pp. 226 et seq. As to a demand for a revision of the Hebrew Bible to correct its differences from the Vulgate, see Emanuel Deutsch's Literary Remains, New York, 1874, p. 9. For the work and spirit of Calovius and other commentators immediately following the Reformation, see Farrar, as above; also Beard, Schaff, and Hertzog, Geschichte des alten Testaments in der Christlichen Kirche, pp. 527 et seq. As to extreme views of Voetius and others, see Tholuck, as above.

  1. The present writer, visiting Moscow in the spring of 1894, was presented by Count Leo Tolstoi to one of the most eminent and influential members of the sect of "Old Believers," which dates from the reform of Nikon. Nothing could exceed the fervor with which this venerable man, standing in the chapel of his superb villa, expatiated upon the horrors of making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of with two. His argument was that the two fingers, as used by the "Old Believers," typify the divine and human nature of our Lord, and hence that the use of them is strictly correct; whereas, signing with three fingers, representing the blessed Trinity, is "virtually to crucify all three persons of the Godhead afresh."
    Not less cogent were his arguments regarding the immense value of the old text of Scripture as compared with the new.
    For the revolt against Nikon and his reformers, see Rambaud, History of Russia, vol. i, pp. 414-416; also Wallace, Russia, vol. ii, pp. 307-309; also Leroy Beaulieu, L'Empire des Tsars, vol. iii, livre iii.