gious contest need a
standard--some outward sign which appeals to the eye and the
intelligence of all. The most serious of the political questions
that convulse France to-day are symbolized and summed up in the
color of a flag; and thus in the Russian conflict between popular
obstinacy and the modern propagandism the rallying-sign of the Old
Believers, and the emblem of the champions of nationality and
conservatism, was the beard. The national chin was the centre of a
conflict less puerile than might be fancied. Long before Peter the
Great imitators of Western ways had begun to shave, thus setting at
defiance the Oriental custom which everywhere prevailed in Russia.
Under Peter's father one of the Raskol leaders, the protopope
Avvakum, denounced "these bold-faced" men--bold-faced meaning
shaven. The prohibition of Leviticus (xxix. 27; xxi. 5) was first
adduced, in conformity with the love for alleging religious
scruples. Recourse was next had to the ancient missals and the
decrees of the _Stoglaf_, a sort of ecclesiastical code attributed
to a national council. The prohibition of the razor was at first
confined to the clergy, but it spread by little and little to all
the faithful of the orthodox Church. Up to the time of Nikon the
patriarchs had laid hardly less stress on forms and on the exclusion
of foreign ways than their future opponents of the Raskol, and had
condemned shaving as "an heretical practice which disfigures the
image of God, and makes men look like dogs and cats." This is the
main theological argument of the foes of the barber, and their
current interpretation of the verse of Genesis, "God created man in
His own image," "The image of God is the beard," writes a Raskolnik
about 1830, "and His likeness is the moustache." "Look at the old
images of Christ and the saints," urge the Old Believers: "all of
them wear their beards." And so cogent is the argument that the
orthodox theologians are fain to hunt up the scanty list of
beardless saints to be found in Byzantine iconography. Whatever the
force of the arguments drawn from divinity, at bottom the opposition
was only the simple folks' one way of seeing things--the same
clinging to forms, the same compound of symbolism and realism. The
living work of God is to them as sacred as the text of the divine
word. Every word and letter of the sacred office must have its
separate significance; and they cannot admit that the hair with
which the Almighty has covered