A Russian of the olden time would have resisted the attempt to deprive him of his beard as strenuously as a Calvinist of the present day would resist the attempt to make him abjure the doctrine of Predestination--and both for the same reason.

As the doctrine of Predestination is for the Calvinist, so the wearing of a beard was for the old Russian--an essential of salvation.

"Where," asked one of the Patriarchs of Moscow, "will those who shave their chins stand at the Last Day ?--among the righteous adorned with beards, or among the beardless heretics ?" The question required no answer.
In the seventeenth century this superstitious, conservative spirit reached its climax.

The civil wars and foreign invasions, accompanied by pillage, famine, and plagues with which that century opened, produced a wide-spread conviction that the end of all things was at hand.

The mysterious number of the Beast was found to indicate the year 1666, and timid souls began to discover signs of that falling away from the Faith which is spoken of in the Apocalypse.