Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/269

254 the kingdom of the Holy Spirit. Accused and convicted of heresy, he was burned at the stake in 1689 at Moscow.

The Khlysti themselves claim to be of national, and also of divine origin; they have their traditions and a gospel, orally transmitted, for it is a principle of their creed, scrupulously observed, never to reduce their doctrines to writing. When their God appeared on earth he cast aside the Scriptures and prohibited all written testunony, in order that his disciples might never be disturbed by conflicting statements, or by disputes and differences of opinion such as distract the Orthodox and the Old Believers; by this precaution they hide the mysteries of their faith and the secrets of their worship, and give to personal inspiration its widest, freest scope, unfettered by any previously recorded revelation.

According to their traditions, the true faith was revealed during the reign of Peter the Great by the Father Almighty, who descended from heaven in clouds of fire, upon Mount Gorodine, in the government of Vladimir, and was incarnate in the person of Daniel Philippovitch, a peasant of Kostroma, and a deserter from the army, to whom his adorers gave the appellation of the God "Sabaoth."

By union with a woman a hundred years old, he begat a son named Ivan Timofeievitch Souslov, whom, before reascending into heaven, he proclaimed to be the Christ. His followers called themselves the "worshippers of the living God," and, like the Brahmins of India, who teach the constantly-recurring birth of Vishnu, they seem to have felt the need of a frequent re-apparition of the Divinity to keep alive the faith; and they have had a procession of Christs, succeeding one the other, by adoption or filiation, each reverenced as the living Saviour, the representative of the first incarnation.