must adopt the Latin era.  The old Slavonic characters, hallowed by immemorial ecclesiastical use, were partly cast aside, and what were retained took a new shape.  The masculine attire was altered and the chin was shorn of its beard, while the veil no longer might protect the modesty of the women.  The impression made by such a succession of shocks upon a nation so bigotedly attached to its ancestral ways was comparable only to an earthquake rocking Old Russia to its foundations.

Many of these innovations, as being borrowed from the Romanists or the Lutherans of the West, had a religious significance for the people.  The change introduced by Peter the Great in the ancient calendar, in the Slavonic alphabet and in the national costume seemed but a carrying out of those which Nikon had initiated.  So natural was the parallel that the Old Believers held the one to be but the continuation of the other; and the notion took shape in a seditious legend, according to which Peter was the adulterous offspring of the patriarch.  The popular aversion felt for the reforms of the latter was augmented by that aroused by the emperor’s innovations:  the social revolt took the disguise of religion, since it had been provoked by a Church measure, and still more because Russia had not yet emerged from that stage of civilization in which every great popular movement assumes a religious aspect.  A national prestige was thus communicated to the Raskol, which in its turn lent to the popular resistance the energy of religion.  By giving the social revolt the semblance of a struggle for the rights of conscience the schism imparted to it a vigor and persistency which the lapse of two centuries has not succeeded in crushing.

But the Raskol rebelled not only against innovations and the introduction of foreign elements, but still more obstinately against the principle of the reforms and the modern method of state administration.  The Russian, like the Mohammedan East of to-day and all other primitive societies, was most keenly sensitive to the burdens and vexations made necessary by this imitation of the European governmental system.  From this point of view the Raskol was the opposition of a half-patriarchal society to the regular, scientific, omnipresent, impersonal system of European administration.  It kicks instinctively against centralization and bureaucracy—­against the state’s encroachments upon private life, the family and the community.  It struggles to tear itself loose from the pitiless machinery of government, hemming every life within its iron pale.  The Cossack took refuge in the wild freedom of nomadic life, and the Old Believer was equally averse to giving in to the complicated mechanism of government.  He would have nothing to do with the census, with passports or stamped paper.  He strove to elude the new systems of taxation and conscription, and to this day some of the Raskolniks are in a state of systematic revolt against the simplest