Believers; that is, true believers, and, by a singular contradiction, founded their claim to this designation upon the alleged antiquity of their practices, stubbornly ignoring the fact that the innovations, against which they rebelled, in reality restored the ancient worship in its primitive purity, while they were the innovators.
The principle underlying the Raskol is essentially realistic and materialistic, pushed to its extreme limits. Notwithstanding the extravagance of its deductions and the moral barrenness of its results, it is, in the singleness of purpose and fanatical sincerity of its adherents, entitled to respect, if not to sympathy. Reverence for the letter of the law is, for the Old Believer, a consequence of his regard for its spirit; in his mind the two are inseparably united; the form and the essence are one; both necessary elements of faith, both equally of divine origin, essential parts of a complete and perfect whole, revealed by God to man, as the only way of salvation; nothing in it is trivial, nothing superfluous; all is profound, mysterious, holy; one jot or one tittle may not pass from the law, and the words of St. John, set as a seal to close the Apocalypse, are, for him, a real and awful curse.
In this scrupulous regard for form the Raskol is in direct opposition to Protestantism, impatient of all fetters and restraint; it is allied to it in the free interpretation it allows to the text of the Word and in the many explanations it permits of the symbols of the faith. It seeks constantly a hidden, allegorical signification, not only in the expressions used, but also in the events narrated by the sacred writers; for instance, the story of Lazarus has been explained as a parable, and not a miracle performed by the Saviour; Lazarus was the human soul, his death the state of sin; Martha and Mary were, one
