of Satan’s accession.  But not content with turning the line of monarchs into so many emissaries of hell, some of these champions of Old Russia have managed, by the help of an anagram, to identify their native country with the mysterious land which is the object of so many prophetic curses.  In the Asshur of the Bible they find Russia, and apply to it the anathemas launched by the prophets against Nineveh and Babylon.

The infernal sign, however, was visible to the Raskolniks not only in the title and the names of their rulers, but in all their innovations as well, and in all that they imported from abroad.  Since Russia is under the dominion of the “devil, the demon’s son,” the truly faithful are bound to reject all that has been introduced during “the years of Satan.”  Encouraged by the notion of Antichrist, the Raskol’s opposition against the modern reform of government spread until it embraces in its hostility everything brought from the West.  In no other of its developments do we see more distinctly the characteristic features of the schism, its narrow formalism and its coarse allegorizing, its blind worship of the past and its national exclusiveness.  It presented the novel spectacle of a group of popular sects holding in abomination every object of foreign commerce, everything new—­material articles of consumption not less than the discoveries of science.  While the products of the East and West Indies were pouring into the rest of Europe, the Old Believer rigorously excluded them.  He frowned upon the use of tobacco, of tea, of coffee and of sugar, and by a curious transfer of his respect for antiquity to his meat and drink, he stormed against almost all colonial produce as heretical and diabolical.  All that had come in since Nikon and Peter was put under the ban by the champions of the ancient liturgy.  One Raskolnik forbade traveling on turnpikes, because they were an invention of Antichrist.  More recently, another showed that the potato was the forbidden fruit which caused the fall of our first mother.  On every side the Old Believer raised about him a wall of scruples and prejudices, entrenching himself behind his stagnation and ignorance, and anathematizing all civilization in a breath.  To meet Peter’s edicts enjoining a new costume or alphabet or calendar, the Raskol put forth a second decalogue:  “Thou shalt not shave; Thou shalt not smoke; Thou shalt use no sugar,” etc.  In the North, where they are stricter and more numerous, many Raskolniks still have conscientious scruples about using tobacco and putting sugar in their tea.  The scriptural arguments urged for this opposition are generally marked by the coarsest realism.  The Old Believer who will not smoke adduces the passage, “There is nothing from without a man that entering into him can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.”  The rebuker of the use of sugar urges that blood is used in its manufacture; whereas Scripture forbids