Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/196

Rh of favoring them, was summoned to Constantinople for his justification, about 1162; and, during his absence, Leon, a neighboring prelate, usurped charge of his diocese. He openly professed and encouraged the practices laid to the charge of Nestor, and which, while at variance with canonical rule, aimed at stricter observance of Church discipline. He preached the necessity of abstaining from meat at the festivals of the Nativity and the Epiphany, whenever they should fall upon a Wednesday or a Friday. Nestor was acquitted and returned, but the heresy had meanwhile assumed such proportions as to necessitate a further reference to the patriarch, before whom Leon was cited to appear, and by whom he was tried and condemned. This authoritative decision was set at naught by Constantine II., Metropolitan of Kiev, a native Russian, who shared the opinions advocated by Leon, and supported them by his authority.

This religious movement, the first of which any record exists within the Russian Church, is, in its ceremonial character, typical of the dissensions which arose in subsequent centuries; it was swallowed up and forgotten in the civil commotions distracting the country, but, in connection with it, the devotional disposition of the people was manifested in the popular belief that to divine displeasure, aroused by the defection of the head of the Church, was to be attributed the sack and ruin of Kiev, the holy city, in 1168, by a coalition of the appanaged princes, under Andrew Bogoloubsky of Souzdal.

In 1370 the sect of the Strigolniki appeared. They took their name from the craft of their founder, one