discussions and divisions turn, giving rise to the wildest aberrations and strangest compromises.  The more practical retain marriage as a social conventionality, while the more logical make celibacy universally binding, thereby fostering anything but asceticism.  Among the Russian sectaries the familiar combination is repeated of sensuality and mysticism.  Free-love has been both preached and practiced among them; and among the lower classes the grossest heresies of ancient Gnosticism have mingled with the wildest and most morbid of modern social theories.  Most of their theological writers, while avoiding such extremes, urge the most extraordinary maxims in connection with their forbiddance of marriage, such as that immorality, being but a passing weakness, is less criminal than marriage, which is interdicted by the faith....  To such a point as this have the conscientious champions of old ceremonial been brought.  They have carried with them a few shreds of ancient ritual, and they have not only abandoned Christian and natural morality, but in their struggle with modern government and civilization deny the principle which upholds all society.

Even fanatics must stand affrighted before conclusions like these, and the Bezpopovtsy feel the need of some justification for their subversal of the cultus and the morality of Christianity.  They find but one solution for the awful enigma presented by Christ’s abandonment of the Church and mankind, by the extinction of appointed sacraments and means of grace, and by the impious rupture of the tie between man and God.  The downfall of Church and priesthood and the triumph of falsehood and wrong were foretold by the prophets.  This is the time predicted in Holy Writ, when the very elect shall be wellnigh seduced, and when God shall seem to give up His own into the hand of the Adversary.  The priestless Church is the Church in the state of widowhood foretold by Daniel in the last days.  Thus, the Raskol was brought by the new path of theology to that belief in the approaching end of the world and the reign of Antichrist to which we have already seen it led by its aversion to ecclesiastical and civil reforms.  That the reign of Antichrist is begun is the fundamental doctrine of the Raskol, and particularly of the Bezpopovstchin.  In the light of this new dogma all the contradictions of the latter are explained and justified.  This is the reason for the extinction of the priesthood, of marriage and of the family.  Wherefore—­many ask—­wherefore continue the race when the archangel’s trump is about to proclaim the end of humanity?