Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/172

172 Nor was a fanatical adhesion to the mere letter of the sacred text confined to western Europe. About the middle of the seventeenth century, in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the Great, Nikon, Patriarch of the Russian Greek Church, attempted to correct the Slavonic Scriptures and service-books. They were full of interpolations due to ignorance, carelessness, or zeal, and in order to remedy this state of the texts Nikon procured a number of the best Greek and Slavonic manuscripts, set the leading and most devout scholars he could find at work upon them, and caused Russian Church councils in 1655 and 1666 to promulgate the books thus corrected.

Straightway great masses of the people, led by monks and parish priests, rose in revolt. The fact that the revisers had written in the New Testament the name of Jesus correctly, instead of following the old wrong orthography, aroused the wildest fanaticism. The monks of the great convent of Solovetsk, when the new books were sent them, cried in terror: "Woe, woe! what have you done with the Son of God?" They then shut their gates, defying patriarch, council, and Czar, until, after a struggle lasting seven years, their monastery was besieged and taken by an imperial army. Hence arose the great sect of the "Old Believers," lasting to this day, and fanatically devoted to the corrupt readings of the old text.