blessed by the presence of the Son of God; there are Bethlehems on the banks of the Volga and of the Oka, where new Christs have been born "to bring glad tidings of good things."
"I am the God announced by the prophets, descended a second time upon earth for the salvation of mankind, and there is no other God but Me," is the first commandment of Daniel Philippovitch, the incarnate God of the Khlysti.
In no other country, among no other civilized people, would such cynical blasphemies be listened to, much less reverently accepted; and their success denotes a mental state as primitive, as credulous, and as expectant of divine revelation as was that of the Eastern world when Christ appeared.
The two most important of the mystic sects, the "Khlysti" and the "Skoptsi," or the "Flagellants" and the "Eunuchs," are generally considered to be closely connected; the latter to be, perhaps, an extension or a continuation of the former.
The "Khlysti" are so called from khlyst, a whip, in allusion to the practice common among them of selfflagellation; they take themselves the name of "Khrystovschina," or the "Community of Disciples of Christ," which, by a sarcastic play on words, is transformed into "Khlystovschina," or "Community of the Whip." The appellation they prefer is "Lioudi Bojii"—"Men of God," and they address each other as "brother" and "sister."
The origin of the sect is uncertain; it is supposed to have arisen about the middle of the seventeenth century, and to have been introduced into Russia by foreign traders. Some authorities give as its founder one Kullmann, a disciple of Jacob Boehm. This visionary came to Russia as the apostle of a new revelation; announced himself to be the Messiah, and preached the coming of
