Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/258

Rh vival of Bezpopovtsism, kindled by the vigorous repressive measures of the government at the time of Pougatchev's rebellion, towards the end of the eighteenth century. Its founder was a soldier named Efim, who deserted from the army and found refuge in a convent of the Feodocians, situated in the wilds of Olonetz. He turned monk, became involved in disputes with his superiors, and appealed to Praobrajenski for redress; his complaint was rejected, whereupon he announced himself as the apostle of a new creed, and went forth preaching the absolute renunciation of all social ties and obligations, taking for his text the words of the Saviour, "to leave father and mother, son and daughter, to take up the cross and follow me" (Matthew x., 36–38). Practical application of this allegorical precept soon degenerated into vagrancy, and worse. His followers, absolved from all restraint, social and moral, in open warfare with all constituted authority, shunning all manner of work as sinful, lived by mendicancy, and, when that failed, by theft; their ranks were swelled by vagabonds and ruffians, ready to embrace a faith so much in accordance with their ideas. Pillage, robbery, even murder, to secure means of subsistence, were sanctioned, or inculcated as religious duties. They made friends and proselytes among the ignorant and superstitious population, chiefly in Kostroma and Yaroslav, where they terrified the peasantry by their threats, or imposed upon them by claims of peculiar sanctity and self-abnegation. Their mode of procedure was calculated to impress the excitable imaginations of the country people dwelling in the solitary depths of the forest; they would mysteriously, at night, gather round a lonely hut and, unseen in the darkness, chant devotional hymns in a solemn, melancholy strain, and appeal to ancient Slavonic hospitality, invok-