and was incarnate in a peasant named Daniel Philippov. Their service consists in dancing and in nameless horrors that follow. There are the Skopzi, whose god is a man named Selivanov, whom they believe to have been a reincarnation of our Lord and of the Czar, Peter III; they practise self-mutilation, and hope that when they have converted 144,000 virgins (Apoc. xiv. 1–4) the end of the world will come.[1] The Duchoborz believe in successive reincarnations of our Lord, and worship a number of their own prophets who claimed to be the Son of God. In 1898, after a very sharp persecution, they fled to Canada, and gave endless trouble to its Government by going out to meet the Second Coming in a place where they would have all died of cold and hunger. But one need not go on describing the blasphemous madness of these unhappy lunatics. That there are about twenty-five millions of Russians who belong to such sects is the only point that is significant. The Stundists lastly are people of quite different kind, simply Protestants of the Lutheran type, and entirely respectable in every way.[2]
Returning to the established Church of Russia after these fanatics, one finds in it as a vivid contrast the profoundest peace. We have seen some—and we shall unfortunately see more—of the quarrels that now rend various branches of the Orthodox Communion; it is relief to be able to point out that there are no quarrels in the Church of Russia. The Holy directing Synod and the Imperial Russian police take care of that. But it would not be fair to say nothing about the Russian clergy but the servility of its hierarchy. Throughout that enormous Empire there must be thousands of village priests who stand for the cause of Christ among their people, who baptize the
- ↑ Selivanov's secret Gospel, which is the raving of a lunatic, has been done into German by K. Grass: Die geheime h. Schrift der Skopzen, Leipzig, 1904.
- ↑ For all this movement see Bonwetsch: Raskolniken in the Realenzyklopädie (1905), xvi. pp. 436–443. He counts fifteen millions as the highest probable figure; the E. d'Or., that are always well informed, give twenty-five millions as the number (iv. p. 231). One advantage of their existence is that they afford unequalled opportunities for the scientific study of lunacy. Russian doctors and psychologists are taking up the matter from this point of view, and they publish most deserving works on the pathology of mind-disease—they have plenty of material to study.
