his own family: surely their
motto, "The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life," has been
well acted up to. Indeed, the whole theology of the Dukhobortsy
may be summed up as a bold attempt to depart from the empty Greek
formalism and arrive at a spiritual and unconventional worship,
an enlargement of the outline given in the shortest and grandest
of sermons.

The Molokani are said to have obtained this name from taking milk
and butter during fast times when they are forbidden to the Orthodox,
but more probably from the fact of their having colonies on either
bank of the river Molochnaia, so called from the whiteness of its
waters, due to potassium salts. They are very closely akin to the
Dukhobortsy, of which sect they are an offshoot. They hope for a
millennium, and to this end tend all their communistic experiments;
for each of their village settlements is striving to manufacture
its own earthly Paradise and run it on its own lines.

[Illustration: SHRINE IN THE CONVENT SOLOVETSKII, KOLA.]

The Stunda is perhaps the largest and most rapidly developing faction
of nonconformity, for it has ramified from Odessa--its starting
point--throughout Tsarland, save in the extreme north and north-east.
This faith can be traced directly to the influence of certain Lutherans
who emigrated from Wuertemberg and settled in the fruitful
"_tchenoziom_," or black earth lands, some half-century ago. The
Stundist organization is much like that of the "Low Church" division
of Protestantism, save that it has no ordained clergy, a body whom
it regards as a somewhat expensive luxury, and replaces by elected
elders, who lead the very simple services, at which any man or
woman who feels called upon to do so may say what he or she will.
These gatherings are more prayer-meetings than services, for there
is no "Form of Prayer" to be used, but simply informal prayer,
praise and song in the best room of a farmhouse, though, now that
the Government are not so strict in their search after heretics,
regular wooden "meeting-houses" have appeared in some of the Stundist
villages.

If few of the rational sects have committed their history and their
views, or indeed their creeds, to writing, lest they should fall
into the hands of spies and be used in evidence against them, much
more is this the case with those whose search after truth has led
them to forsake the lines of rationalism and enter the land of
mysticism and spiritualism. But two of t