grown to such proportions as to excite popular jealousy and government suspicions; their leaders were accused of illicit and underhand machinations, of secret plotting, dangerous to public welfare and to the authority of the State; they became involved in lawsuits and disputes regarding property alleged to have been obtained under false pretences, or by bequests under pressure of improper influences. An inquiry was ordered by Nicholas, which resulted in the confiscation of their riches, the sequestration of their buildings and estates, and, gravest calamity of all, in the loss of their independence. The hospitals and cemeteries were left to their charge, but an imperial commissioner was added to their board of administration. Their religious services were prohibited, and their churches were closed or handed over to priests appointed by the Holy Synod.
By this last measure the Popovtsi suffered equally with their radical brethren of the other branch, inasmuch as their clergy, although of Orthodox ordination, were, as renegades from the established Church, forbidden to officiate.
Rogojski, the headquarters of Popovtsism, had provided means for its social organization, but it never had possessed any sacred authority, and had not, nor could it have, satisfied the eager aspirations of its disciples for an ecclesiastical government of divine origin.
For many long and weary years they had endeavored to find an escape from their only, but humiliating, method of recruiting the priesthood, and to establish a hierarchy of their own of regular apostolic descent. Some among them had advocated as efficacious the imposition of hands by a deceased prelate, present at least in the flesh, but the ceremony was incomplete; a corpse could not, and no one present could for it, pronounce the sacramental
