Karp, a sheep or wool shearer, a man of the people, with whom was joined Nikita, a deacon of the Church. The movement was a popular protest against the greed, covetonsness, and corruption of the clergy, and it spread rapidly among the lower classes at Pskov and Novgorod. Its founders commenced by railing at, and finally rejecting, the clergy altogether, as being a human institution, rendered despicable by the ignorance, degradation, and covetousness of its members; they alleged, by authority of St. Paul, that any Christian brother was empowered to teach the Gospel, and, for priests, they substituted leaders chosen freely among themselves. They denied the rite of episcopal ordination, and that the imposition of hands could endow the clergy with any divine power of imparting the grace of the Holy Ghost; this power they claimed for every believer, as an essential privilege of Church membership, by which all brethren were invested with the rights of spiritual priesthood. They renounced auricular confession and priestly absolution, as being contrary to God's commands to confess one's sins to Him, and to bow before Him alone; they rejected the priest's office in baptism and communion, and administered these sacraments one to another. To chant psalms over the dead, and to offer up prayers and oblations for their souls, they declared to be an innovation of the devil, practised by his agents, the priests, to satisfy their greed and covetousness, by the fees they earned. Nikita, degraded from his office, was thrown into prison, and Karp, victim of the fickleness of popular favor, was, at the instigation of his enemies, the priests, drowned by a mob in the river Volkov. The sect was suppressed, so far as outward manifestations went, but the leaven of its teachings remained fermenting in the popular mind.
A century later, about 1470, a heresy, known as that of
