many of these sectaries for the faith that is in them. Quite
recently a judge tried to bring to reason a group of peasants who were
under prosecution for celebrating clandestine religious rites, but he
could extract no other answer than this: "Our fathers practiced these
customs. Take us anywhere you please, but leave us free to worship as
our fathers did." A like reply is said to have been made by the Old
Believers of Moscow to the late czarovitch on occasion of a visit to
their burying-ground at Rogojski.

The liturgic reform of the seventeenth century was a revolution in the
simplest elements of worship: it called upon the son to unlearn the sign
of the cross that his mother had taught him. Such a change would have
been hazardous anywhere, but it caused a peculiarly serious disturbance
in Russia, where all prayer is connected with a kind of ceremonial of
repeated bowings and crossings, which more closely resemble the
devotional customs of the Mohammedans than those of other Christian
countries. The people violently rejected the new sign of the cross and
the entire reformed liturgy. It mattered little that the new ritual was
more ancient than their own. The ignorant Russian knows no antiquity
older than his fathers and grandfathers, and his attachment to the outer
forms of orthodoxy was only intensified by remembering the recent
attempts of popes and Jesuits to gain a foothold in the country. If he
suffered the least change in his cherished customs, he might risk being
Romanized, and, like the United Greeks of Poland, one day wake up and
find himself part and parcel of the spiritual dominion of the papacy.
With such dim fears the Old Believer opposed to the orthodox hierarchy a
blind fidelity to orthodoxy. Their dread of seeing the Church corrupted
inspired people and clergy with suspicion of all foreigners, even of
their brethren in the faith whom the czars or the patriarchs had invited
from Byzantium and from Kief. The Russian alone, of all the orthodox
nations, had maintained his independence against infidel and pope, and
he held himself the people of God, chosen to preserve the true faith.
Everything European was indiscriminately rejected by this long-isolated
nation. Their detestation of the West, its churches and its
civilization, leads some of the Old Believers to anathematize even the
language of theology and learning. Not longer ago than the close of the
last century one of their writers waxed hot against the