It is as difficult to pick out the most characteristic traits of the innumerable Russian sects as it is to describe the contours of clouds that fleet across the sky. Their numbers escape all official reckoning and the variety of their beliefs renders classification very difficult. In these pages the sectarian organism has been presented in its most recent and most picturesque aspects, and its chief characteristic seems to be that it develops by a process of subdivision. Each existing sect divides itself up into various new ones, and these again reproduce themselves by breaking apart, like the first organisms in which life was manifested on the earth. Every separated portion of the parent becomes an offspring resembling the parent, and the number of divisions increases in proportion to the number of adherents. As in the protozoa, multiplication commences with a mechanical rupture, and with the passage of time and the influence of outside elements, the sects thus born undergo visible modifications. By turns sublime or outrageous, simple or depraved, they either aspire heavenwards or debase the human spirit to the level of its lowest passions.

Making common use of the truths of the Gospel revelations, they include every phase of modern social life in their desire for perfection. Liberty, equality, wealth, property, marriage, taxes, the relation between the State and the individual, international peace, and the abolition of arms—all these things, even down to the very food we eat, become the prey of their reformatory ardour.

The sects that abound in Anglo-Saxon countries do little but copy one another in evolving new and amazing variations of Bible interpretation. Confined within these limits, they rarely even touch upon the serious problems that lie outside the text of the Gospels, and we might say of them as Swift said of the religious sects of his day—"They are only the same garments more or less embroidered."

But the Russian sects vividly reveal to us the secret dreams and aspirations of millions of simple and honest men, who have not yet been infected by the doctrinal diseases of false science or confused philosophy; and further, they permit us to study the manifestation in human life of some new and disquieting conceptions. In their depths we may see reflected the melancholy grandeur and goodness of the national soul, its sublime piety, and its thirst for ideal perfection, which sometimes uplifts the humble in spirit to the dignity and self-abnegnation of a Francis of Assisi.

The mysticism which is so deep-rooted in the Russian national consciousness breaks out in many different forms. Not only poets and writers, painters and musicians, philosophers and moralists, but statesmen, socialists and anarchists are all impregnated with it—and even financiers and economic reformers.

Tolstoi, when he became a sociologist and moralist, was an eloquent example of the mental influence of environment; for his teachings which so delighted—or scandalised, as the case might be—the world, were merely the expression of the dreams of his fellow-countrymen. So was it also with the lofty thoughts of the philosopher Soloviev, the macÂbre tales of DostoÏevsky, the realistic narratives of Gogol, or the popular epics of Gorky and Ouspensky.

The doctrines of Marx took some strange shapes in the Russian milieu. Eminently materialistic, they were there reclothed in an abstract and dogmatic idealism—in fact, Marxism in Russia was transformed into a religion. The highly contestable laws of material economics, which usually reduce the chief preoccupations of life to a miserable question of wages or an abominable class-war, there gained the status of a veritable Messianic campaign, and the triumphant revolution, imbued with these dogmas, strove to bring the German paradox to an end, even against the sacred interests of patriotism. The falling away of the working-classes and of the soldiers, which so disconcerted the world, was really nothing but the outer effect of their inner aspirations. Having filled out the hollow Marxian phraseology with the mystic idealism of their own dreams, having glimpsed the sublime brotherhood which would arise out of the destruction of the inequality of wages and incomes, they quite logically scorned to take further part in the struggle of the nations for independence. Of what import to them was the question of Teutonic domination, or the political future of other races?

It is much the same with the peasant class. The partition of the land is their most sacred dogma, and they can scarcely imagine salvation without it. This materialistic demand, embellished by the dream of social equality, has become a religion. Mysticism throws round it an aureole of divine justice, and the difficulty—or the impossibility—of such a gigantic spoliation of individuals for the sake of a vague ideal, has no power to deter them.

The land—so they argue—belongs to the Lord, and the unequal way in which it is divided up cannot be according to His desire. The kingdom of heaven cannot descend upon earth until the latter is divided among her children, the labourers.

The far-off hope of victory faded before these more immediate dreams, and the continuation of a war which seemed to involve their postponement became hateful to the dreamers; while the emissaries of Germany took advantage of this state of affairs to create an almost impassable gap between the few who were clear-sighted and the mass who were blinded by visions.

The extreme rebelliousness which characterises the Russian religious visionaries is manifested to an almost equal extent by all political parties and their leaders. Consequently the spirit of unity which prevailed (during the war) in other countries met with insuperable difficulties in Russia.

The whole nation seems to have been driven, by the long suppression of free thought and belief, added to the miseries brought about by the old rÉgime, to take refuge in unrealities, and this has resulted in a kind of deformity of the national soul. It was a strange irony that even the aristocracy should end by falling victim to its own environment. Exploited by miracle-mongers, thrown off its balance by paroxysms of so-called mysticism, it disappeared from view in a welter of practices and beliefs that were perverse and childish even at their best.