of governmental methods.  Religious grounds, of course, are found for this insubordination, and they have theological arguments to urge against the census, as well as against the registration of births and deaths.  In the opinion of a strict Old Believer the right of numbering the people belongs to God alone, as is shown by the biblical record of David’s punishment.  Sometimes the official designations strengthen the scruples of these simple folk, with their tendency to attach a great importance to phrases and names; and hence, partly at least, the popular antipathy to the poll-tax under its Russian form, “soul-tax.”  The revolt against such phrases is the fashion in which this nation of serfs, whose body was chained to the soil, asserted its possession of a soul.[007]

The struggle against the supervision and interference of the state has gone with some sects to the length of refusing submission to obligations imposed by every civilized country.  The Stranniki (wanderers) in particular boast of keeping up a ceaseless struggle with the civil authority, and make rebellion a moral principle and a religious duty.  From condemning the state as the protector and helper of the Church, they have come to cursing it for its own tendencies and claims.  Thus, the singular spectacle is presented of the more extreme schismatics looking upon their native government with the same feelings as were entertained by some of the Christians of the first three centuries toward the pagan empire of Rome.  To these fanatics the government of the orthodox czars came to be the reign of Satan and the dominion of Antichrist.  Nor was this an empty metaphor:  it was a clear, determined conviction, and it still exerts a strong religious and political influence upon the schism.  The Raskolniks could see but one interpretation of the overturning of public and private order under Peter the Great, and for what they regarded as the triumph of darkness:  to them it was the coming end of the world and the advent of Antichrist.  The old customs, it seemed, must carry with them in their fall the Church, society and all mankind.  For centuries the extremity of agony or of wonder has wrung this cry from Christendom.  After political revolutions and disastrous wars, in the most enlightened countries of Europe, in France and elsewhere, religious persons, in the panic of calamity, have been seen to take refuge in this last solution for the woes of Church or of State, and proclaim with the Raskolniks that the time was at hand.  But what must have been the state of mind in Old Russia when the stunning blows of Peter the Great seemed to be dashing everything to pieces?  Even at the period of the liturgic reform the fanatics had cried that the patriarch’s fall was the harbinger of the world’s end.  The days of man, they said, are numbered; the Apocalyptic woes are at hand; Antichrist draws nigh.  With the accession of Peter the Great, while he was reducing everything to confusion before their bewildered eyes,