had them hunted down in the forests and massacred, shut up in their churches and burnt, tortured, flogged, and exiled. The whole Raskolnik movement forms the weirdest and most unsavoury story of religious mania in the world; not even the maddest Mohammedan sects have gone to such an extreme of lunacy as these Old Believers. When a Slav peasant gets religious mania he gets it very badly indeed. Their original indictment against Nikon and the State Church was that he had introduced these abominations: to make the sign of the Cross with three fingers instead of with two, to pronounce the Holy Name Iisus instead of Isus, to say in the Creed, "the Holy Ghost, Lord and Lifegiver," instead of "true one and Lifegiver,"[1] as well as various other changes of the same importance. Because of these innovations and heresies they declared that the established Church had become the kingdom of Antichrist, New Rome (which, of course, stood by Nikon and his reform) had fallen as low as Old Rome, they, the Raskolniks, alone were the true Church of God, and Noah's ark in the universal flood. The Raskolniks then split into two chief factions, the "Priestly" and "Priestless" Old Believers. They had few priests and no bishops at first, so the question soon arose: How were they to go on? Some determined to do the best they could and to manage with the few priests who occasionally joined them, or even, in the case of necessity, to receive Sacraments from the clergy of the established Church. These priestly Raskolniks are the less radical party; they have stayed where they were when the schism began, and still differ from the Orthodox only in the matter of Nikon's changes. In 1846 a deposed Bosnian metropolitan joined them, set up a see at Belokriniza in Bukovina, and ordained other bishops; so they got a hierarchy of their own at last. They also, after centuries of persecution, now receive some measure of toleration in Russia, and about a million of them have joined the State Church as Uniates (the only Uniates in the Orthodox world), that is, they are allowed to go on using their ante-Nikonian
- ↑ The word "true one" instead of " Lord " was just one of the many errors that had crept into the Old Slavonic books, The original Greek is, of course, to τὸ κύριον, τὸ ζωοποιόν.
