CHAPTER IX.
The Raskol.—Early Heresies.—Attempted Reforms in Church.—Nikon.—Peter the Great.—The Popovtsi and the Bezpopovtsi.—Political Aspect of the Raskol.
The Orthodox Russian Church, for upwards of two hundred years, has been disturbed by numerous mysterious sects, almost wholly unknown abroad, and but partially understood at home. The religious movement from which they derive their being, generally designated as the "Raskol,"[1] or the "Schism," is peculiarly Russian and national in its origin and character. It has never extended beyond the limits of the empire, and, within them, it is restricted chiefly to the more ancient provinces, where the population is essentially Muscovite; it is of most diverse nature, absolutely without unity in its development, subdivided into a thousand different branches, separate and distinct one from the other, having only for their common object opposition to the established Church. It is exclusively a popular movement; it had its rise, and still exists, in the peasant's hut, and among the common multitude, without sympathy from, or affiliation with, the educated or upper classes of society, and it indicates a mental and social condition of the people which has no parallel in other lands.
Both German Protestantism and Russian Raskol preserve the stamp of their similar religious origin, as issuing each from an established State Church, but here the
- ↑ Raskol is a Russian word meaning the cleft, the rupture.
