The liturgic reform of the seventeenth century was a revolution in the simplest elements of worship:  it called upon the son to unlearn the sign of the cross that his mother had taught him.  Such a change would have been hazardous anywhere, but it caused a peculiarly serious disturbance in Russia, where all prayer is connected with a kind of ceremonial of repeated bowings and crossings, which more closely resemble the devotional customs of the Mohammedans than those of other Christian countries.  The people violently rejected the new sign of the cross and the entire reformed liturgy.  It mattered little that the new ritual was more ancient than their own.  The ignorant Russian knows no antiquity older than his fathers and grandfathers, and his attachment to the outer forms of orthodoxy was only intensified by remembering the recent attempts of popes and Jesuits to gain a foothold in the country.  If he suffered the least change in his cherished customs, he might risk being Romanized, and, like the United Greeks of Poland, one day wake up and find himself part and parcel of the spiritual dominion of the papacy.  With such dim fears the Old Believer opposed to the orthodox hierarchy a blind fidelity to orthodoxy.  Their dread of seeing the Church corrupted inspired people and clergy with suspicion of all foreigners, even of their brethren in the faith whom the czars or the patriarchs had invited from Byzantium and from Kief.  The Russian alone, of all the orthodox nations, had maintained his independence against infidel and pope, and he held himself the people of God, chosen to preserve the true faith.  Everything European was indiscriminately rejected by this long-isolated nation.  Their detestation of the West, its churches and its civilization, leads some of the Old Believers to anathematize even the language of theology and learning.  Not longer ago than the close of the last century one of their writers waxed hot against the orthodox priests of Lesser Russia, many of whom, he said, “study the thrice-accursed Latin tongue.”  He reviled them for their readiness to commit the mortal sin of calling God Deus, and God the Father Pater, as though the Deity could have no other than the Slavic name of Bog, or the change of appellation involved a change of God.  A like spirit is evident in the resistance offered by the Staroveres to the correct spelling of the name of Jesus, whom they persist in calling Issous, rejecting as diabolical the more accurate form Iissous.  Such peculiarities show a nation shut up in its own vastness and isolated by its position and its history.  It is a kind of Christianized China, knowing, and desiring to know, nothing beyond itself.