ngth of the great popular movements of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, such as the Streltsy insurrections at the
time of the revolt of Pougatchef, whose excesses curiously recall
the wars of the Peasants and Anabaptists in the West before the
abolition of serfdom. In the great Russian Jacquerie, and in all the
seditions which held out the hope of emancipation, the first place
was taken by the Old Believers and the Cossacks, most of whom held
the same faith. These two forms of national resistance are naturally
akin. They equally personify the character and the prejudices of the
old Russian. Their main point is their character of protests, so
that an Old Believer may be described as a Cossack in religion,
transporting into that domain the instincts peculiar to the wild
horsemen of the Don. But both Cossack and Starovere have found
themselves forced to give way before the march of civilization, and
the different branches into which the Raskol has split have reached
very divergent conclusions both as to politics and religion.

III.--INTERNAL DIVISIONS.

Nothing is more logical than religious creeds--nothing more rigorously
consequent in its deductions than the theological mind. Religious
thought has an unimpeded course in the twilight of mystery where it
takes its airy flight, and no material facts avail to check it or divert
it from the chosen path. The innate logic of the Russian mind adds force
to the kindred theological quality in its influence upon the Raskol, for
the inhabitant of Greater Russia is distinguished for his logical
consecutiveness and his acceptance of the extremest consequences of a
position. This is partly the cause of the multiplicity and growth of the
strange doctrines prevalent among them; and while this disposition
frequently lands the schism in the most grotesque of absurdities, it
gives a remarkable unity and regularity to even its apparent
divergencies and variations. Irregularity and the play of chance have as
little real place in this spiritual phenomenon as in one belonging to
the region of physics; and a knowledge of the _terminus a quo_
would have suggested its complications as well as the point ultimately
reached. One is now and then tempted to look upon the various sects as
utterly chaotic, but it is not difficult to trace the general course of
their natural evolution.

A less robust faith might easily have been cast down by the obstacle
which confronted the schism at