cclesiastical and
religious revolt into the further stage of a social and civil
insurrection.

II.--OPPOSITION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.

In spite of himself, Peter the Great both inherited and aggravated
the schism. At the present day it is hard to picture the impression
produced upon his subjects by Peter I. He not merely astonished and
bewildered them: he scandalized them. An open, systematic and
sometimes brutal attack was made upon the customs, traditions and
prejudices of the people. The reformer did not confine himself to
the civil institutions: he laid violent hands upon the Church, and
forced his way into the family, regulating, as the whim seized him,
both public affairs and the private life of the citizen. The
old-fashioned Russian was a stranger in Peter's new empire. His eyes
were shocked by the spectacle of an unaccustomed garb, and novel
administrative titles fell strangely on his ear. Names and things,
the almanac and the laws, the alphabet and the fashions of
dress,--everything was transformed. The very elements of
civilization were hardly recognizable. The year began on the first
of January, instead of the first of September. Men were no longer to
date from the creation, but must adopt the Latin era. The old
Slavonic characters, hallowed by immemorial ecclesiastical use, were
partly cast aside, and what were retained took a new shape. The
masculine attire was altered and the chin was shorn of its beard,
while the veil no longer might protect the modesty of the women. The
impression made by such a succession of shocks upon a nation so
bigotedly attached to its ancestral ways was comparable only to an
earthquake rocking Old Russia to its foundations.

Many of these innovations, as being borrowed from the Romanists or
the Lutherans of the West, had a religious significance for the
people. The change introduced by Peter the Great in the ancient
calendar, in the Slavonic alphabet and in the national costume
seemed but a carrying out of those which Nikon had initiated. So
natural was the parallel that the Old Believers held the one to be
but the continuation of the other; and the notion took shape in a
seditious legend, according to which Peter was the adulterous
offspring of the patriarch. The popular aversion felt for the
reforms of the latter was augmented by that aroused by the emperor's
innovations: the social revolt took the disguise of religion, since
it had been provoked by a Church measur