and Uniate Catholics, the Armenians, Jews, and Moslems, we find twenty-five millions of Russians who live in schism from the established Church. These people are the Raskolniks and the members of the numberless sects that have grown out of that movement. The Raskol schism began in the 17th century when Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow,[1] reformed the Russian liturgical books. Gradually a number of errors, misspellings, and mistranslations had crept into these books. Nikon carried out his correction of them very conscientiously; he sent an Archimandrite to Constantinople to collect copies of the original Greek books from which the Russian ones had been translated, and his only object was to restore the correct text. The changes that he made were that people should make rather fewer prostrations (μετάνοιαι) during service, should sing Alleluia twice instead of three times in the liturgy, and should make the sign of the Cross with three instead of with two fingers. It is characteristic of the Slav mind that these changes should have produced an uproar all over Russia. The Patriarch was tampering with the holy books, was changing the faith of their fathers, was undermining the Christian religion; he had been bought like Judas by the Jews, the Mohammedans, and the Pope of Rome (this was specially hard, because Nikon could not abide the Pope of Rome). So numbers of people left his communion, calling themselves Starovjerzi (Old Believers); they were and still are commonly known in Russia as Raskolniki (apostates). From the very beginning these absurd people were most cruelly persecuted by the Government, and the persecution produced the usual result of making them wildly fanatical. Peter the Great was tolerant to every sect except to the Raskolniks; he
- ↑ Nikon († 1681) was one of the last patriarchs before Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate. He was a very admirable and saintly person. In 1660 he was deposed by the Government for trying to be independent in ecclesiastical affairs. That he made an enormous fuss about quite absurd things (for instance, whether the sign of the Cross should be made with two or with three fingers), and that he quite lost his head in cases of Popery (he had all the ikons that were painted in Latin fashion seized, their eyes poked out and then ignominiously broke them on the church floor—"Latin fashion" meant that the figures were correctly drawn, as in Western Europe)—these things only mean that he was a true son of the Orthodox Church. Cf. Bonwetsch: Nikon, in the Realenzykl. xiv. pp. 86–89.
