upper classes, who look down on the Raskolniks with contempt. But not a few of them are rich men. They engage in trade, especially in money-lending. Sober, honest, industrious, thrifty, they are able to surpass the orthodox Russians in the competition of life. They are regarded by the peasants with the respect due to their character as the more religious people of the land. It is said that if you come upon an especially clean, well-kept cabin in Russia, the proprietor will turn out to be an old dissenter. The Raskolnik people have been credited with "erudite ignorance."
But the movement did not spring from any new spiritual awakening, anything like a revival, such as we see to have been the source of most of our English and American separate Christian denominations. It started purely in protest against new phrases and rubric directions, and these were not innovations on sacred originals, but corrections of verbal corruptions and changed usages which Nicon and the scholars who helped him regarded as marks of degeneration. Thus the supposed novelties were really reversions to antiquity. But this was not admitted by the ignorant peasants, and just as Jerome's Vulgate, which was a corrected Latin version of the Bible that Pope Damasus had ordered because the various popular versions were very corrupt, was nevertheless received with suspicion and hatred by the mutitude; and, as the English Revised Version has also been regarded by most ignorant Bible readers with dislike, so Nicon's correction of the service book was treated as an irreverent meddling with holy words and customs. The protest was pressed to the smallest minutiæ. Thus one writer says, "In such a year wiseacres commenced to say, 'O Lord have mercy on us,' instead of 'Lord have mercy on us.'" The Raskolniks were most insistent in holding to the incorrect spelling of our Lord's name as "Issus," instead of accepting Nicon's correction of it to "Iissus."[1] But perhaps the most hated innovation, or rather reversion to antiquity, was the substitution of the
- ↑ The second "i" is pronounced soft like the η in Ἰησοῦς.
