he had already passed in this manner of imprisonment; for three more years he was sentenced to remain. He earned his own subsistence as clerk and assistant in the large draper's shop. In Shusha itself, if I may trust the official statistics, the members of the Armenian Protestant community did not exceed twenty-six souls in 1886. [49] Russian policy of the present day abhors missionary effort; it has been justly remarked by a recent clerical traveller that if a priest wishes to travel in the Russian provinces he must divest himself of his clerical character and clerical garb. [50] I myself can testify to the extreme difficulty with which the Protestant missionaries in Turkey obtain permission to cross Russian soil. Such is the jealousy of that Orthodox Church, the object of British episcopal blandishments, to whose mercies it is announced that the Archbishop of Canterbury is about to transfer his long-cherished pupils, the Chaldæan or Assyrian Christians of Kurdistan. [51] To Sembat the Russian colonists were an object of peculiar interest, not indeed in the same capacity in which they appealed to the Governor, but by reason of the kind of religion which they professed. Here was a people who, like himself, were exiles for the sake of religion, who resembled, in their aversion to the trammels of ecclesiasticism, the congregations in whose bosom he had himself been reared. The history of the Dukhobortsy or Dukhoborians--I became familiar with the latter termination, and such is the name of the sect to which these settlers belong--composes a chapter which is neither the least remarkable nor the most creditable in the history of the Russian Church-State. Their origin would appear to be wrapt in some mystery; according to one account a discharged soldier first disseminated the teaching in the Government of Kharkov and in the year 1740. [52] Count Tolstoy adopts the view, which would appear the more probable, that it was a foreigner, a Quaker, immigrant to Russia, who spread the seeds of their belief. [53] Neither their opinions, nor the temper which was the outcome of their convictions, were calculated to promote the smoothness of their early course. In a country where Church interests permeate every act of policy, they denied the necessity, even the expediency of a Church. Among a people attached with devotion to their temples, images and eikons, they professed the uselessness of all such external aids to religious life. The crusty formulas cracked under their merciless logic; and the grim earnestness with which these spiritual combatants grappled with themselves and with society wore out the patience or aroused the apathy of the State. Already in the eighteenth century they suffered persecution; and so bitter grew the feeling against them, that in the early years of the nineteenth century the Emperor Alexander I. settled them in the Tauric province, in the neighbourhood of the Sea of Azov. But Alexander was not the man