Messiahs.  Dreams like these in the West incited the revolutions of the peasants in mediaeval times and of the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century, but they must slowly vanish with the slavery which gave them birth.  The age of freedom anticipated by the mujik, the kingdom of God of which he caught a glimpse in the promises of the prophets, is come at last:  the Messiah and freer of the people has appeared, and his reign is begun.  The emancipation of the serfs has given a blow to these millennial dreams, and consequently to the more advanced sects of the Raskol:  its ruin will be completed by education and material improvement.

The sects whose general evolution we have sketched may appear to us ridiculous and childish.  We are tempted to look with contempt upon a people capable of such extravagances; but such an estimate would be erroneous.  Absurdity and extravagance have always found a ready welcome when presented under the garb of religion; and countries boasting of older and more widespread civilization are not behind Russia in this regard.  The Raskol has its counterpart in the past and the contemporary sectarianism of England and of the United States.  A strong likeness holds between the Puritans and the Old Believers; and both as to originality and religious eccentricities the Anglo-Saxon and the inhabitant of Greater Russia may be compared.  The Russians delight in pointing out the resemblances between their country and the great republic of the New World; and this is not the least of them.  The Americans have their prophets and prophetesses, just like the old Russian serfs, and no absurdity or immorality is too gross to find preachers and converts among them.  How shall we account for so striking an analogy between the two most extensive empires of the two continents?  To characteristics of race and an incomplete blending of different stocks, or to the nature of the soil, the extremes of heat and cold, and the strong contrasts of the seasons? to the vastness of their territories and the scanty diffusion of population and culture over areas so immense? or still again to the rapid and inharmonious growth of the two countries—­to the lack of popular education in the one, and the low standard of the higher education in the other?  Separately or combined, these causes fail completely to explain the curious phenomenon; and still they are the most striking points of resemblance between the two colossal powers.  In some respects, the sectarian spirit presents itself in a different and almost opposite manner in the democratic republic and the despotic empire.  In the United States the ranker growths of religious enthusiasm spring from an excess of individualism and enterprise—­from the independent and pushing temper transported from politics and business into religion.  In Russia, on the contrary, the popular mind has thrown off all restraint in the religious sphere, simply because this was long the only one in which it could disport