and the apostles; and the sole mission of the Church and the clergy is to preserve both intact.  This leaning to symbolism saves his scrupulous fidelity to outward forms from degenerating into a slavish superstition.  On the other hand, the allegorizing tendency which clings fast to the letter sometimes takes odd liberties with the spirit of ceremonies and texts.  It is the peculiarity of the symbolizing temper scrupulously to respect the form while arbitrarily dealing with the spirit.  Thus, the ritual and the sacred books become a kind of heavenly charade, whose answer must be found by the imagination.  And so, in their hunt after the hidden sense of narratives and words, some of the Raskolniks have allegorized the histories of the Old and New Testaments, and changed the gospel records into parables.  Some have gone so far as to see in the greatest of the gospel miracles nothing but types.[005] Such a system of exegesis easily leads to a kind of mystic rationalism:  the forms of religion tend to gain more consistency than the essence, and public worship to be placed above doctrine.  Some of the extreme sects of the Raskol have actually reached this point.  A perfect carnival of wild interpretation prevailed among this ignorant rabble, and crazy doctrines and grotesque tenets were not slow in following in its train.

The Old Believer loves his peculiar rites, not only for the meaning he puts into them, but also for the sake of the authority on which he holds them:  the moral and social rationale of the schism is a deep respect for traditional customs and for the habits handed down from his forefathers.  But even in his slavish devotion to ancestral ritual and prayers the Starovere simply exaggerates a feeling which, if not properly religious, commonly links itself with religion and adds to its influence.  All men and all nations set great store by the maintenance of their hereditary faith, and even the common rhetorical abuse of such phrases demonstrates its power.  When thus intertwined with the associations of family and country, religion assumes the guise of an inheritance solemnly committed to our trust by the departed.  This feeling is singularly powerful in Russia from linking itself with a superstitious veneration for antiquity.  You can often get no other reason from many of these sectaries for the faith that is in them.  Quite recently a judge tried to bring to reason a group of peasants who were under prosecution for celebrating clandestine religious rites, but he could extract no other answer than this:  “Our fathers practiced these customs.  Take us anywhere you please, but leave us free to worship as our fathers did.”  A like reply is said to have been made by the Old Believers of Moscow to the late czarovitch on occasion of a visit to their burying-ground at Rogojski.