The man who laid hands on the sacred books was
everywhere held guilty of sacrilege. Whether from a knowledge of the
propriety of the measure, or from the spirit of ecclesiastical fidelity,
the higher clergy upheld the patriarch, but their inferiors and the
common people made a determined fight. And even now, after the lapse of
more than two centuries, a large body adhere immovably to the ancient
books and the ancient ritual, which are made sacred to them by the
approbation of national councils and the blessing of generations of
patriarchs. Such was the inception of the schism, the Raskol, which
still divides the Russian Church. Tracing the matter back to its source,
the contest is seen to turn upon the knotty question of the transmission
and the translation of the sacred texts, which has more than once
divided the churches of the West. In Russia no one was competent to form
a proper judgment of the essence of the dispute, and it was thus
rendered only more lasting and bitter. Monks, deacons, plain sextons,
denounced the innovations as novelties borrowed from Rome or from the
Protestants, and as being tantamount to the bringing in of a new
religion. When the Church brought to bear upon these recusants the pains
and penalties everywhere employed against heretics, the only result was
to give the schism martyrs, and with martyrs a fresh impetus. Ten years
after the promulgation of the revised liturgy its rash author fell a
victim to the jealousy of the boyards and to his own arrogance, and was
solemnly deposed by a council. To the Raskol his deposition appeared in
the light of a justification of their own course. The condemnation of
the reformer seemed necessarily to involve the condemnation of the
reform. Great, then, was the popular bewilderment when the council
turned from deposing the author of the liturgic revision to hurl its
anathemas against those who opposed that revision. The share taken in
this excommunication by the Oriental patriarchs rather lessened than
added to its weight, since the dissenters denied to Greek and Syrian
bishops, who knew not a letter of the Slavonic alphabet, the right of
passing judgment on Slavonic books.

The theological world is no stranger to subtleties, but never perhaps
did causes so trifling breed such interminable quarrels. The sign and
the form of the cross, the heading of processions westward or eastward,
the reading of a particular article of the Creed, the spelling of the
name o