The end of the world was announced to be nigh even before Peter the Great; and they who proclaimed it are not yet weary of awaiting it.  Like Christians in the West in other periods, they are not undeceived by the delay of the destined time, and are at no loss to explain it.  Many consider the reign of Antichrist to be a period or era which may last for centuries, as one of the three great epochs in religious history, and as having, like those of the old and the new dispensations, a law of its own which abrogates what went before.  All of the Raskolniks, or even of the Bezpopovtsy, however, do not agree as to Antichrist; for while his reign is generally admitted, it seems to be very differently understood.  Those who retain the priesthood and the more moderate of their opponents hold his reign to be spiritual and invisible, and government and established Church to be the unconscious or unwilling tools of Satan; while the extremists of the Bezpopovstchin maintain that Antichrist reigns materially and palpably.  He it is, as we have seen, who occupies the throne of the czars since Peter the Great, and his Sanhedrim that usurps the name of the holy synod.  Trivial as the difference is, theologically speaking, its political consequences are considerable; for the state may arrive at some understanding with sects that only regard it as blind and misled, while even a truce is out of the question with those which look upon it as the incarnate enemy of souls.

Very singular are the vagaries to which the ignorant peasants are naturally led by this belief.  Since the world is in subjection to “Satan, the son of Beelzebub,” all contact with it was defiling, and submission to its laws nothing short of a denial of the faith.  To escape the hellish contagion the best means was isolation or rigid withdrawal into inaccessible retreats or desert places.  In their spiritual confusion and terror some of the sectaries saw no refuge but death, and murder and suicide were systematically resorted to for the purpose of shortening the time of probation and hastening their departure from the accursed world.  With some fanatics, called “child-slayers” (dietoubuetsy), it was held a duty to expedite the entrance to heaven of newborn children, and thus to save them infernal anguish.  Others, called “stranglers” or “butchers” (duchelstchiki, tiukalstchiki), think they render a valuable service to their relatives and friends by anticipating a natural death, in hastening the end of those who are seriously ill.  Taking with a savage literalness the text, “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matt. xi. 12), they hold that none can enter into the kingdom of heaven but those who die a violent death.  One of the most numerous and powerful bodies in the first century of the Raskol, the Philipovtsy, or “burners,” like the Indian fakeers, preached redemption by suicide, and salvation by the baptism of fire, holding that the flames alone could purify men from the defilements of a world which had fallen under the rule of Satan.  In Siberia and the neighborhood of the Ural these sectaries have been known to burn themselves in hundreds on enormous piles built for the purpose, or by families in their hovels, to the sound of hymns and chants.  Such acts have been known even during the present century.