the scanty list of beardless saints to be found in Byzantine iconography.  Whatever the force of the arguments drawn from divinity, at bottom the opposition was only the simple folks’ one way of seeing things—­the same clinging to forms, the same compound of symbolism and realism.  The living work of God is to them as sacred as the text of the divine word.  Every word and letter of the sacred office must have its separate significance; and they cannot admit that the hair with which the Almighty has covered a man’s face is without a meaning.  It is to them the distinctive mark of the male countenance; to remove it is to change, and therefore to disfigure, the divine handiwork:  it is, in short, hardly less than mutilation.[008]

The beard, like the single repetition of the Hallelujah and the cross with eight branches, has had its martyrs.  No later than last year (1874), on the Gulf of Finland a peasant who had been drafted for the navy obstinately refused to be shaved, and rather than betray his religion underwent a sentence of several years for insubordination.  Scruples of this sort have led the government to grant permission to wear the beard in the case of certain corps (for instance, the Cossacks of the Ural) which are mainly composed of Old Believers.  Peter the Great used every means to overcome these popular prejudices, but the beard was too much for the reformer.  Finding himself unable to shave all the recusants by force, he bethought him of laying a tax on the wearers of long beards, but in vain.  He was similarly foiled in his attempt to lay a double tax on the schismatic upholders of the ancient ways.  He forbade them to live in the towns; he deprived them of civil rights; he forced them to wear a bit of red cloth on the shoulder as a distinctive badge; but these measures only marked them out as the bravest champions of national traditions, and increased the respect everywhere rendered them.

Such an attitude toward civilization leaves no room for mistake as to the social and political character of the schism.  It is a popular protest against the irruption of foreign customs.  It is a reaction against the reforms of Peter the Great, somewhat as Ultramontanism is a reaction against the spirit of the French Revolution.  The Staroveres are the champions of ancient customs in the civil sphere as well as in the religious.  The Old Believer is emphatically the old-fashioned Russian—­the Slavophilist of the lower classes—­and hence extreme to the point of absurdity.  His revolt against authority has more resemblance to that of La Vendee than to that of the Jacobins.  Like a conscript obstinately refusing to join his regiment, he holds back from all part and lot in the changes of modern Russia; and in this light the schism is the feature which above all others assimilates Russia to the East.