CHAPTER XI

The Russian Government is notoriously tender-hearted.  But even the worm will turn. . . .

Scholars who have treated the life of the ex-monk Bazhakuloff divide it into five clearly marked periods:  the probationary, dialectical, political, illumined and expiatory.

The first began in youth when, being driven from his father’s house by reason of his vagrant habits and other incorrigible vices, he entered a monastery near Kasan.  Despite occasional lapses prompted by the hot blood of his years and punished with harsh disciplinary measures, he seems to have performed his monkish duties with sufficient zeal.  It was observed, however, that with increasing years he became unduly interested in questions of dogma.  He talked too freely; he was always arguing.  Being unable to read or write, he developed an astonishing memory for things he had heard and faces he had seen; he brought them up at inconvenient moments.  He grew factious, obstreperous, declaring that there was much in the constitution of the Holy Russian Church which ought to be amended and brought up to date.  What people wanted, he said, was a New Jerusalem.  A violent altercation with his Superior touching the attributes of the Holy Ghost ended in a broken jaw-bone on the part of the older man, and the expulsion of the younger.  The dialectical period had set in.  The convent inmates, on the whole, were glad to see the last of him—­particularly the Father Superior.

We next find him living in a large barn about fifteen miles from Moscow.  The Superior being unwilling to publish the true facts of the broken jaw-bone, a certain fame, the fame of an earnest but misunderstood religious innovator, had preceded him.  Adherents, barely twenty at first, gathered to his side.  These disciples, humble analphabetics like himself, have left us no word of what passed at those long discussions.  Certain it is that he now began to formulate the rules of his Revised Church.  They were to live on charity, to go bare-headed, and to wear red blouses—­like the Christians of old.  The charm of these simple regulations spread abroad, and gained him fresh recruits.  There were now some cultured folk among them, who collected his saying into the golden book.  He decided to limit his disciples to the “Sacred Number 63,” and to call them “Little White Cows.”  Asked why he chose this title, he answered that cows were pure and useful animals without which humanity could not live; even so were his disciples.  The innate good sense of this speech increased his reputation.  About this time, too, he would sometimes prophesy, and undergo long periods of motionless self-abstraction.  At the end of one of these latter, after tasting no food or drink for three and a half hours, he gave utterance to what was afterwards known as the First Revelation.  It ran to this effect:  “The Man-God is the Man-God, and not the God-Man.”  Asked