The revolt against the innovating patriarch was, in reality, a revolt against foreign, particularly against Western, influences.  Instead of the accusation that he leaned to Romanism or Lutheranism, it would have been a better representation of the real grievance to charge him and the czar with borrowing from the West, not its theology, but its spirit and civilization, and even this, perhaps, unwittingly.  The outbreak of the Raskol synchronizes with the introduction of foreign influence; and the coincidence is not accidental.  The schism was but the reaction against the reforms which the Romanoffs carried out in so European a spirit.  The patriarch’s enterprise has been sometimes attributed to his vanity or his thirst for literary fame, but it was really the first indication of the approaching revolution, and of a growing sympathy with the West, where (as in England, for instance) at about the same period analogous[006] reforms gave birth to similar disturbances.  If the former hermit of the White Sea invited criticism and learning to review the ritual of his Church, it was only in obedience to the same Zeitgeist which under Peter the Great’s elder brother, who succeeded Alexis, was to found at Moscow a kind of ecclesiastical university modeled on that of Kief.  The Church, not less than the State, felt the Western breeze that was rising on the Russian steppes.  And, as the Western spirit first attempted to introduce itself in the sphere of religion, so religion confronted it with its most formidable barrier.  From the historian’s point of view, the Raskol is that same popular resistance to the introduction of Western novelties which under Peter the Great passed from its original aspect of an ecclesiastical and religious revolt into the further stage of a social and civil insurrection.

II.—­OPPOSITION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.

In spite of himself, Peter the Great both inherited and aggravated the schism.  At the present day it is hard to picture the impression produced upon his subjects by Peter I. He not merely astonished and bewildered them:  he scandalized them.  An open, systematic and sometimes brutal attack was made upon the customs, traditions and prejudices of the people.  The reformer did not confine himself to the civil institutions:  he laid violent hands upon the Church, and forced his way into the family, regulating, as the whim seized him, both public affairs and the private life of the citizen.  The old-fashioned Russian was a stranger in Peter’s new empire.  His eyes were shocked by the spectacle of an unaccustomed garb, and novel administrative titles fell strangely on his ear.  Names and things, the almanac and the laws, the alphabet and the fashions of dress,—­everything was transformed.  The very elements of civilization were hardly recognizable.  The year began on the first of January, instead of the first of September.  Men were no longer to date from the creation, but