CHAPTER XVIII.
THE DISSENTERS Dissenters not to be Confounded with Heretics--Extreme Importance Attached to Ritual Observances--The Raskol, or Great Schism in the Seventeenth Century--Antichrist Appears!--Policy of Peter the Great and Catherine II .-- Present Ingenious Method of Securing Religious Toleration--Internal Development of the Raskol--Schism among the Schismatics--The Old Ritualists--The Priestless People--Cooling of the Fanatical Enthusiasm and Formation of New Sects--Recent Policy of the Government towards the Sectarians--Numerical Force and Political Significance of Sectarianism.
We must be careful not to confound those heretical sects, Protestant and fantastical, of which I have spoken in the preceding chapter, with the more numerous Dissenters or Schismatics, the descendants of those who seceded from the Russian Church--or more correctly from whom the Russian Church seceded--in the seventeenth century.

So far from regarding themselves as heretics, these latter consider themselves more orthodox than the official Orthodox Church.

They are conservatives, too, in the social as well as the religious sense of the term.

Among them are to be found the last remnants of old Russian life, untinged by foreign influences.
The Russian Church, as I have already had occasion to remark, has always paid inordinate attention to ceremonial observances and somewhat neglected the doctrinal and moral elements of the faith which it professes.

This peculiarity greatly facilitated the spread of its influence among a people accustomed to pagan rites and magical incantations, but it had the pernicious effect of confirming in the new converts their superstitious belief in the virtue of mere ceremonies.
Thus the Russians became zealous Christians in all matters of external observance, without knowing much about the spiritual meaning of the rites which they practised.