profligate character are accepted as inspired prophetesses.
Their leaders have considerable influence over their followers, but exercise no priestly functions save baptism. Their form of worship is simple and elementary; the Bible is read and expounded, or, in the absence of a teacher, the congregation awaits in silence and obscurity for a manifestation of the spirit. To this Quakerlike simplicity and absence of ceremony the Bezpopovtsi join scrupulous regard for the devotional practices of the primitive Church; they strictly observe the fasts, and hold the holy images and relics in superstitious veneration; they retain the sign of the cross, repeating it in their prayers very many times, according to the ancient Russian method, and they perform assiduously the "pokloni," or saluations before the Icons.
Inasmuch as their service is stripped of most of the ceremonies of the Church, they attach the more importance to such as they have retained, investing them with peculiar significance. Certain sects ordain the performance of a hundred "pokloni," for the purification of food, two hundred at a funeral; they impose upon a neophyte two thousand a day for six weeks, with the addition of twenty full prostrations each week. They have a holy horror of tobacco, sugar, and coffee, and avoid certain dishes, the flesh of unclean animals, such as the hare and the pigeon. They seem thus to find compensation for the rejection of the spiritual rites of the Church in slavish and exaggerated compliance with the more gross and materialistic.
Although they have no priests, they have monks and nuns, who dwell in "skeets," or hermitages, under strict and rigorous rules, holding their property in common, and axe subject to the authority of a superior, charged
