Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/200

Rh ancient and primitive forms of worship, as more akin to, and in harmony with, the earliest, and consequently the most reliable, revelations of divine truth. Already, in these obscure dissensions of the Middle Ages, the fundamental principle of the Raskol—that is to say, scrupulous regard for the letter of the law, formalism—begins to assert itself. An annalist of Novgorod, in the fifteenth century, mournfully complains that some of the clergy have impiously changed the ancient invocation of, "Lord! have pity upon us!" for "O Lord! have pity upon us!"

The manner in which the Russian people were converted to Christianity, suddenly, by order, as it were, made religion appear to them as consisting in form, in words, rites, and ceremonies. There had been among them no gradual assimilation of the truth; they had received no previous preparation by long-continued teaching, as in the West; they still retained their former customs, were still imbued with their ancient superstitions, and were too ignorant to fully comprehend, or appreciate, the pure and elevated morality of the Christian faith. Their rulers commanded, and they obeyed, submissively transferring their allegiance from the idol to the cross, worshipping at the altar in the same spirit as before their pagan shrines. The clergy were hardly more enlightened than the people; for them, also, the letter replaced the spirit, and they deemed their functions limited to the exact repetition of external observances.

By the ignorance and carelessness of scribes and copyists, the liturgy, and the Church-books were soon filled with errors, which, hallowed by constant use, passed into general acceptation, and were held in superstitious veneration by both the minister and the worshipper. The strange interpolations, the contradictions, the capricious readings of the text, seemed the more worthy of rever-