Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 88, April, 1875Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 88, April, 1875
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
against Nineveh and Babylon.
The infernal sign, however, was visible to the Raskolniks not only
in the title and the names of their rulers, but in all their
innovations as well, and in all that they imported from abroad.
Since Russia is under the dominion of the "devil, the demon's son,"
the truly faithful are bound to reject all that has been introduced
during "the years of Satan." Encouraged by the notion of Antichrist,
the Raskol's opposition against the modern reform of government
spread until it embraces in its hostility everything brought from
the West. In no other of its developments do we see more distinctly
the characteristic features of the schism, its narrow formalism and
its coarse allegorizing, its blind worship of the past and its
national exclusiveness. It presented the novel spectacle of a group
of popular sects holding in abomination every object of foreign
commerce, everything new--material articles of consumption not less
than the discoveries of science. While the products of the East and
West Indies were pouring into the rest of Europe, the Old Believer
rigorously excluded them. He frowned upon the use of tobacco, of
tea, of coffee and of sugar, and by a curious transfer of his
respect for antiquity to his meat and drink, he stormed against
almost all colonial produce as heretical and diabolical. All that
had come in since Nikon and Peter was put under the ban by the
champions of the ancient liturgy. One Raskolnik forbade traveling on
turnpikes, because they were an invention of Antichrist. More
recently, another showed that the potato was the forbidden fruit
which caused the fall of our first mother. On every side the Old
Believer raised about him a wall of scruples and prejudices,
entrenching himself behind his stagnation and ignorance, and
anathematizing all civilization in a breath. To meet Peter's edicts
enjoining a new costume or alphabet or calendar, the Raskol put
forth a second decalogue: "Thou shalt not shave; Thou shalt not
smoke; Thou shalt use no sugar," etc. In the North, where they are
stricter and more numerous, many Raskolniks still have conscientious
scruples about using tobacco and putting sugar in their tea. The
scriptural arguments urged for this opposition are generally marked
by the coarsest realism. The Old Believer who will not smoke adduces
the passage, "There is nothing from without a man that entering into
him can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are
they that defile the man." The rebuker of the use of sugar urges
that blood is used in its manufacture; whereas Scripture forbids the
eating of the blood of animals--a prohibition, by the way, which
seems to have been maintained longer in Russia than in any other
Christian country. The true ground of the opposition to this or that
article or habit is to be sought not in these theological arguments,
but in its novelty and late introduction. As regards his way of life
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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