\6z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Nor was a fanatical adhesion to the mere letter of the sacred 

 text confined to western Europe. About the middle of the seven- 

 teenth century, in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the Great, 

 Nikon, Patriarch of the Russian Greek Church, attempted to cor- 

 rect the Slavonic Scriptures and service-books. They were full of 

 interpolations due to ignorance, carelessness, or zeal, and in order 

 to remedy this state of the texts Nikon procured a number of the 

 best Greek and Slavonic manuscripts, set the leading and most 

 devout scholars he could find at work upon them, and caused 

 Russian Church councils in 1G55 and 1GGG to promulgate the books 

 thus corrected. 



Straightway great masses of the people, led by monks and parish 

 priests, rose in revolt. The fact that the revisers had written in the 

 New Testament the name of Jesus correctly, instead of following 

 the old wrong orthography, aroused the wildest fanaticism. The 

 monks of the great convent of Solovetsk, when the new books were 

 sent them, cried in terror : " Woe, woe ! what have you done with 

 the Son of God ?" They then shut their gates, defying patriarch, 

 council, and Czar, until, after a struggle lasting seven years, their 

 monastery was besieged and taken by an imperial army. Hence 

 arose the great sect of the " Old Believers," lasting to this day, and 

 fanatically devoted to the corrupt readings of the old text.* 



Opera, edit. Bretschneider, vol. xx, pp. 665 et seq. In the White Library of Cornell Uni- 

 versity will be found an original edition of the book with engravings of the monster. For 

 the Monchkalb, see Luther's works as above, vol. xix, pp. 2416 et seq. For the spirit of 

 Calvin in interpretation, see Farrar, and especially H. P. Smith, D. D., Inspiration and In- 

 errancy, chap, iv, and the very brilliant essay forming chap, iii of the same work, byL. J. 

 Evans, pp. 66 and 67, note. For the attitude of the older Church toward the Vulgate, see 

 Pallavicini, Histoire du Concile de Trente, Montrouge, 1844, torn, i, pp. 19, 20; but espe- 

 cially Symonds, The Catholic Reaction, vol. i, pp. 226 et seq. As to a demand for a revision 

 of the Hebrew Bible to correct its differences from the Vulgate, see Emanuel Deutsch's 

 Literary Remains, New York, 1874, p. 9. For the work and spirit of Calovius and other 

 commentators immediately following the Reformation, see Farrar, as above; also Beard, 

 Schaff, and Hertzog, Geschichte des alten Testaments in der Christlichen Kirche, pp. 527 

 et seq. As to extreme views of Voetius and others, see Tholuck, as above. 



* The present writer, visiting Moscow in the spring of 1894, was presented by Count 

 Leo Tolstoi to one of the most eminent and influential members of the sect of "Old Be- 

 lievers," which dates from the reform of Nikon. Nothing could exceed the fervor with 

 which this venerable man, standing in the chapel of his superb villa, expatiated upon the 

 horrors of making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of with two. His argu- 

 ment was that the two fingers, as used by the " Old Believers," typify the divine and human 

 nature of our Lord, and hence that the use of them is strictly correct ; whereas, signing 

 with three fingers, representing the blessed Trinity, is " virtually to crucify all three persons 

 of the Godhead afresh." 



Not less cogent were his arguments regarding the immense value of the old text of 

 Scripture as compared with the new. 



For the revolt against Nikon and his reformers, see Rambaud, History of Russia, vol. i, 

 pp. 414-416 ; also Wallace, Russia, vol. ii, pp. 307-309 ; also Leroy Beaulieu, L'Empire des 

 Tsars, vol. iii, livre iii. 



