Lupkin was condemned, in 1710, for asserting that the Church had lost the true spirit of Christianity, and that he had been appointed to set it right; Dimitri Tvaritenev was convicted of spreading Calvinistic ideas, by a synod, in 1714. These various doctrines may have aided the development of new opinions, but the Molokani themselves pretend to date from the sixteenth century, when, in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, an English physician introduced among Muscovite friends the reading and study of the Bible. The seed fell on fertile soil, and from it sprang a reformation more radical in its principles than that of Luther and Calvin; a Protestantism of the most advanced type, rigid, rational, and unitarian, recognizing God as supreme, and His Word only as law, but withholding from Christ the full attributes of the Deity, and considering the Holy Ghost as simply a manifestation of Divine Grace.
These ignorant peasants, in reasoning out their faith, seem instinctively to have arrived at conclusions regarding the unity of the Godhead similar to the belief of Locke and Channing in later days.
The Doukhobortsi evince more of the Oriental spirit, and were, perhaps, somewhat influenced by the Bogomile heresies of the Middle Ages, some hints of which may have permeated into Russia with the Bulgarian colonies which settled in the neighborhood of Kiev prior to the thirteenth century, during the wars between the French empire of Constantinople, the Hungarians, and the Turks.[1]
- ↑ The Bogomiles were followers of a Bulgarian doctor named Basil, who rejected the Old Testament and most of the New; denied the resurrection of Christ and the mysteries of the Catholic faith, the sacraments, the necessity of a Church or a priesthood, prohibited marriage, and preached community of goods and of women, and utter reliance on the infinite mercy of God. The name of the sect is derived from the Sla-
