Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/471

Rh created in the image of God and "likening him even unto cats and dogs." So serious was the objection felt to be, that Peter got Dmitri of Rostoff to write a treatise on "The Image and Likeness of God in Man," showing its spiritual character. It had little or no effect on the Old Believers. "The image of God is the beard, and the likeness the moustache," wrote one of these fanatics as late as the year 1836. There have been martyrs to the beard. In the year 1874 a recruit was punished with seven years' imprisonment for mutiny because he refused to be shaved. This is the Nemesis of image worship. The image worshipper can only conceive of God in the form of a conventional icon; and that form, with the bearded aspect of the representation of the First Person in the Trinity, becomes itself sacred in a man.

The old dissenters divided into two parties soon after the origin of the schism. The cause of this division was the extraordinary situation produced by a lack of bishops. In the days of Nicon only one priest stood for the old books—Paul of Kolòmna. This man was imprisoned for his contumacy, and when he died in prison there was nobody in all the Raskol who was competent to administer the sacraments. The difficulty which now stared the Old Believers in the face was entirely novel, quite without parallel. Other schisms in the Church which did not deny episcopacy had carried off bishops with them. Thus there were Marcionite bishops in the early Church who were able to build up a Marcionite hierarcyhierarchy [sic]. On the other hand, the Montanists owed their very existence in great part to a protest against the root idea of an authoritative priesthood, and in this they were followed by the Protestant bodies on the continent, Lutheran as well as Reformed. The controversies that have been fought on the question of the consecration of may enable Anglican High Churchmen to sympathise with the perplexity of the Russian Old Believers. But the Russian dissidents had nobody that they could attempt to put forward on any