As to the actual strength of the sect it is difficult to form even a conjecture.  Certainly it has many thousand members—­probably several hundred thousand.  Formerly the Government transported them from the central provinces to the thinly populated outlying districts, where they had less opportunity of contaminating Orthodox neighbours; and accordingly we find them in the southeastern districts of Samara, on the north coast of the Sea of Azof, in the Crimea, in the Caucasus, and in Siberia.  There are still, however, very many of them in the central region, especially in the province of Tambof.

The readiness with which the Molokanye modify their opinions and beliefs in accordance with what seems to them new light saves them effectually from bigotry and fanaticism, but it at the same time exposes them to evils of a different kind, from which they might be preserved by a few stubborn prejudices.  “False prophets arise among us,” said an old, sober-minded member to me on one occasion, “and lead many away from the faith.”

In 1835, for example, great excitement was produced among them by rumours that the second advent of Christ was at hand, and that the Son of Man, coming to judge the world, was about to appear in the New Jerusalem, somewhere near Mount Ararat.  As Elijah and Enoch were to appear before the opening of the Millennium, they were anxiously awaited by the faithful, and at last Elijah appeared, in the person of a Melitopol peasant called Belozvorof, who announced that on a given day he would ascend into heaven.  On the day appointed a great crowd collected, but he failed to keep his promise, and was handed over to the police as an impostor by the Molokanye themselves.  Unfortunately they were not always so sensible as on that occasion.  In the very next year many of them were persuaded by a certain Lukian Petrof to put on their best garments and start for the Promised Land in the Caucasus, where the Millennium was about to begin.

Of these false prophets the most remarkable in recent times was a man who called himself Ivan Grigorief, a mysterious personage who had at one time a Turkish and at another an American passport, but who seemed in all other respects a genuine Russian.  Some years previously to my visit he appeared at Alexandrof-Hai.  Though he professed himself to be a good Molokan and was received as such, he enounced at the weekly meetings many new and startling ideas.  At first he simply urged his hearers to live like the early Christians, and have all things in common.  This seemed sound doctrine to the Molokanye, who profess to take the early Christians as their model, and some of them thought of at once abolishing personal property; but when the teacher intimated pretty plainly that this communism should include free love, a decided opposition arose, and it was objected that the early Church did not recommend wholesale adultery and cognate sins.  This was a formidable objection, but “the prophet” was equal to the occasion.  He reminded his friends that in accordance with their own doctrine the Scriptures should be understood, not in the literal, but in the spiritual, sense—­that Christianity had made men free, and every true Christian ought to use his freedom.