em,
and thinking their punishment too great for their crimes, they had
recourse to the Court of Appeal, where they begged to be judged
"according to the good laws of the Tsar, not the bad ones of the
Consistory." But the sentence was ratified, and the religion of the
Great Candle procured for its followers the martyrdom that they had so
little desired.

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW ISRAEL

Although most of the sects of which we have spoken sprang from the
orthodox church, the _molokanes_ and the _stoundists_ were indirect
fruits of the Protestant church, and even among the Jews there were
cases of religious mania to be found.

Leaving out of account the _karaitts_ of Southern Russia, formerly the
_frankists_--who ultimately became good Christians--we may remark from
time to time some who rejected the articles of the Jewish faith, and
even accepted the divinity of Christ. Such a one was Jacques Preloker,
founder of the "new Israel," a Russian-Jew philosopher who discovered
the divine sermon on the Mount eighteen hundred and seventy-eight years
after it had been delivered. This was the beginning of a revolution of
his whole religious thought, which resulted in 1879 in the founding of
a new sect at Odessa. The philosopher desired an intimate relationship
with the Christian faith, and dreamed of the supreme absorption of the
Jewish Church into that of Christ. In his new-found adoration for the
Christian Gospel, he tried by every means in his power to lessen the
distance between it and Judaism, but, though some were attracted by his
ardour, many were repelled by the boldness of his conceptions.

Towards the end of his life, the bankrupt philosopher, still dignified
and serious, although fallen from the height of his early dreams, made
his appearance on the banks of the Thames, and there endeavoured to
continue his propaganda and to explain to an unheeding world the
beauties of the Jewish-Christian religion.

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

It is as difficult to pick out the most characteristic traits of the
innumerable Russian sects as it is to describe the contours of clouds
that fleet across the sky. Their numbers escape all official reckoning
and the variety of their beliefs renders classification very difficult.
In these pages the sectarian organism has been presented in its most
recent and most picturesque aspects, and its chief characteristic seems
to be that it develops by a process of subdivision. Each ex