§ 210.1. Sects and Fanatics in the Roman Catholic Domain (§ 187, 6-8, § 190).—On the Catholic Irvingites see § 211, 10.

1. The Order of New Templars sprang from the Freemasons (§ 172, 2). Soon after their establishment in France the Jesuits sought to carry out their own hierarchical ideas. The fable of an uninterrupted connection between freemasonry as a “temple of humanity” and the Templars of the Middle Ages, and the introduction therewith in their secret ceremonies of exercises, borrowed from the chivalry of romance, afforded a means toward this end. The idea was started in the Jesuit college at Claremont and was approved and accepted by the local lodge. In A.D. 1754 a great number of their noble members, who were disgusted with the Jesuit templar farce, withdrew in order as “New Templars” to continue the old order in the spirit of modern times. In consequence, however, of the revolution that broke out in A.D. 1789 they could no longer hold their ground as a band of nobles. Napoleon favoured the reorganization of the order freed from those limits. The day of Molay’s death (§ 112, 7) was publicly celebrated with great pomp in Paris, A.D. 1808 and the order spread among all French populations. On the Bourbon restoration the grand-master was, at the instigation of the Jesuits, cast into prison and the order suppressed. After the July revolution he was liberated and a new temple was opened in Paris in A.D. 1833. The show-loving Parisians for a long time took pleasure in the peculiar rites and costume of the templars. When this interest declined the order passed out of view. Its religion, which professed to be a primitive revelation carried down in the Greek and Egyptian mysteries, from which Moses borrowed, then further developed by Christ and transmitted in esoteric tradition by John and his successors the grand-masters of the templars, taught a divine trinity of being, act and consciousness, the eternity of the world alongside of God and an indwelling of God in man. It declared the Roman Catholic church to be the only true Christianity (église chrétienne primitive). Its sacred book consisted of an apocryphal gospel of John in accordance with its own notions.
2. On the communistic society of St. Simonians, which also sprang up in France, see § 212, 2.
3. St. Simon’s secretary was Aug. Comte, the founder of the Positivist philosophical school (§ 174, 2) and he maintained intimate relations with his master all through life. In his later years he undertook by carrying his philosophical doctrine into the practical domain to sketch out a “religion of humanity,” and thus became the founder of a Positivist religious sect. The men of science indeed who had adopted his philosophical principles (Littré, Renan, Taine, Lewes, Leslie Stephens, Tyndall, Huxley, Draper, etc.), repudiate it; but in the middle and lower ranks some were found longing for an object of worship, who endeavoured on the basis of his Calendrier positiviste and Catechisme positiviste to form a religious society for the worship of humanity. His festival calendar divides the year into thirteen months of four weeks each, named after the thirteen great benefactors of mankind (among whom Christ does not appear), while the weeks are named after lesser heroes. By the profound veneration of woman, which savours greatly of Mariolatry, as well as by the fantastic worship of heroes, geniuses and scholars, which is a mimicry of the popish saint worship, and by the adoption of a sacerdotalism like that of Catholicism, this religion of humanity shows itself to be an antichristian growth on Roman Catholic soil.

§ 210.2.

1. Thomas Pöschl, in the second decade of the century, presents an instance of a degeneration of originally pietistic tendencies into mischievous fanaticism. A Catholic priest at Ampfelwang near Linz, he sought under the influence of Sailer’s mysticism to awaken in his congregation a more lively Christianity by means of prayer meetings and the circulation of tracts, in which he proclaimed the approaching end of the world. When the district in which he lived was, in 1814, attached to Austria, he was committed to prison, and his followers accepted as their leader the peasant Jos. Haas, who led them further still into fanatical excesses. His fanaticism at length went so far that on Good Friday of 1817 a young maiden belonging to their party suffered a voluntary death after the example of Christ for her brothers and sisters. Pöschl professed the deepest horror at this cruel deed for which he was blamed. He died in close monastic confinement in 1837.
2. The Antinomian sect of the Antonians, most numerous in the Canton Bern, had its beginning among the Roman Catholics. Its founder was Antoni Unternährer, born and reared at Shüpfheim, near Lucerne, in the Catholic faith. From 1802 he resided at Amfoldingen, near Thun, where he stood in high repute among the peasants as a quack doctor, gave himself out as the son of God a second time become man, and proclaimed by word and writing the perfect redemption from the curse of the law by the introduction of the true freedom of the sons of God, which was to show itself first of all in the absolutely unrestricted intercourse of the sexes. After two years’ confinement in a house of correction he was banished from the Canton Bern and transported to his native place, where, abandoning all pastoral duties, he died in a police cell in 1814. The sect, which had meanwhile spread widely, and at Gsteig near Interlaken had obtained a new leader in the person of Benedict Schori, a third incarnation of Christ, could not be finally suppressed, notwithstanding the liberal use of the prison, till the beginning of 1840. Even at this day scattered remnants of Antonians are to be found in Canton Bern.
3. When the Austrian constitution of 1849 gave unconditional religious toleration, the Bohemian Adamites (§ 115, 5), of whom remnants under the mask of Catholicism had continued down to the nineteenth century, ventured again publicly to engage in proselytising efforts. An official enquiry instituted on this occasion declared that the sect, consisting of Bohemian peasants and artisans, had its headquarters among the mystics of the Krüdener school, that its religious doctrine was a mixture of communism, freethinking and quietism, and that its members were in their ordinary public life blameless, but that in their secret nightly assemblies, where they dispensed with clothes, they celebrated orgies regardless of marriage or relationship.
4. David Lazzaretti, formerly a carrier in Tuscany, appeared in his native place after an absence of several years, in 1872, declaring that he was descended from a natural son of Charlemagne and had been entrusted by the Apostle Peter with a message to the pope, pointing to a cross that had been burnt upon his brow by the apostle himself. He startled those of the Vatican, where he was quite unknown, by declaring that the bones of his ancestors lay under the ruins of an old Franciscan cloister in Sabina, of whose existence nobody was aware, the discovery of which seemed to vouch for his claims. These were all the more readily admitted when it was found that he made the restoration of the Pope’s temporal power his main task. The number of his adherents, mostly peasants, soon increased immensely, reaching, it is said, 40,000. On Monte Labro they built a church with a strong “David’s Tower,” over which “St. David” appointed two priests who, when they had made certain changes in worship at the call of the prophet, were excommunicated by the bishop. David now began to spread his socialistic and communistic ideas. He insisted that his adherents should surrender their goods to him as representative of the society, and promised down to December 31st, 1890, the introduction of community of goods throughout Italy and afterwards in other countries. In Arcidosso, the prophet’s birthplace, a beginning was to be made, but in its overthrow on August 18th, 1878, he met his death, and his befooled followers waited in vain for the fulfilment of his dying promise that he would rise again on the third day.

§ 210.3. Russian Sects and Fanatics.—After the attempt under Nicholas I. at the forcible conversion of the Raskolniks, especially the purely schismatic Starowerzians or Old Believers (§ 163, 10), had proved fruitless, the government of Alexander II. by patience and concession took a surer way to reconciliation and restoration. In October, 1874, their marriages, births and deaths, which had hitherto been without legal recognition, were put on the regular register and so their lawful rights of inheritance were secured. Under Alexander III. in 1883 an imperial decree was issued, which gave them permission to celebrate divine service after their own methods in their chapels, which had not before the legal standing of churches, and declared them also eligible for public appointments.—To the Duchoborzians (§ 166, 2), sorely oppressed under Catherine II. and Paul I., Alexander I., after they had laid before him the confession which they had adopted, granted toleration, but assigned them a separate residence in the Taurus district. Under Nicholas I. they were to the number of 3,000 transported to the Transcaucasian mountains in 1841, where they were called Duchoborje.—The Württemberg Pietist colonists of South Russia originated among the peasants the widespread sect of the Stundists soon after the abolition of serfdom in 1863. The originator of those separatist meetings for the study of Scripture, which led first of all to the condemnation of image worship and making the sign of the cross as unbiblical, and subsequently to a complete withdrawal from the worship of the orthodox church and the forming of conventicles, was the peasant and congregational elder Ratusny of Osnowa near Odessa, to whom, at a later period, with equal propagandist zeal, the peasant Balabok attached himself. The latter was, in 1871, sentenced to one year’s imprisonment at Kiev and the loss of civil rights, and in 1873, at Odessa, a great criminal prosecution was instituted against Ratusny and all the other leaders of the sect, which, however, after proceeding for five years ended in a verdict of acquittal. A process started in 1878 against the so-called Schaloputs had a similar issue. This sect, spread most widely among the Cossacks of Cuban, rejects the Old Testament, the sacraments and the doctrine of the resurrection, but believes in a continued effusion of the Holy Spirit upon the prophets of the church who have prepared themselves for their vocation by complete abstinence from flesh and spirituous liquor as well as by incessant prayer and frequent fasting.

§ 210.4. About the middle of the eighteenth century among the “Men of God,” the strict interpretation of the prescriptions of their founder Danila Filipow (§ 163, 10) had led many to abstain wholly from sexual relations; when a peasant Andrew Selivanov appeared as a reformer and founded the sect of the Skopzen or mutilators, who, building on misinterpreted passages of Scripture (Matt. v. 28-30, xix. 12; Rev. xiv. 4) insisted upon the destruction of sexual desire by castration and excision of the female breasts, generally performed under anæsthetics, as a necessary condition of entrance into the kingdom of heaven. The first Skopzic congregation was gathered round him in the village of Sosnowka. The “men of God” enraged at his success denounced him to the government. He was punished with the knout and condemned in 1774 to hard labour at Irkutzk. The idea that Peter III., who died in 1762, was still alive, then widely prevailed. The “men of God” had also adopted this opinion, and proclaimed him their last-appearing Christ, who would soon return from his hiding-place to call to account all unbelievers. Selivanov, who knew of this, now gave himself out for the exiled monarch, and was accepted as such by his adherents in his native place. When Paul I., Peter’s son, assumed the reins of government in 1796, a Skopzic merchant of Moscow told him secretly that his father was living at Irkutzk under the name of Selivanov. The emperor therefore brought him to Petersburg and shut him up as an imbecile in an asylum. After Paul’s death, however, his adherents obtained his release. He now lived for eighteen years in honour at Petersburg, till in 1820 the court again interfered and had him confined in a cloister at Suzdal, where after some years he died. Sorely persecuted by Nicholas I. many of his followers migrated to Moldavia and Walachia where they, dwelling in separate quarters at Jassy, Bucharest and Galatz, lived as owners of coach-hiring establishments, and by rich presents obtained proselytes. Still more vigorously was the propaganda carried on in the Moscow colonies on the Sea of Azov. There in Morschansk lived the spiritual head of all Russian Skopzen, the rich merchant Plotizyn. After the government got on the track of this society, Plotizyn’s house was searched and a correspondence revealing the wide extension of the sect was found, together with a treasure of several, some say as much as thirty, millions of roubles, which, however, in great part again disappeared in a mysterious manner. Plotizyn and his companions were banished to Siberia and sentenced to hard labour, the less seriously implicated to correction in a cloister.—The secret doctrine of the Skopzen so far as is known is as follows: God had intended man to propagate not by sexual intercourse but by a holy kiss. They broke this command and this constituted the fall. In the fulness of time God sent his Son into the world. The central point of his preaching transmitted to us in a greatly distorted form was the introduction of the baptism of fire (Matt. iii. 11), i.e. mutilation by hot irons for which, in consideration of human weakness, a baptism of castration may be substituted (Matt. xix. 12). Origen is regarded by them as the greatest saint of the ancient church; to his example all saints conformed who are represented as beardless or with only a slight beard. The promised return of the Christ (in this alone diverging from the doctrine of the “men of God”), took place in the person of the emperor Peter III. whom an unstained virgin bore, who was called the empress Elizabeth Petrovna. The latter after some years transferred the government to a lady of the court resembling her and retired into private life under the name of Akulina Ivanovna, where she still remains invisible behind golden walls, waiting for the things that are to come. Her son Peter III., who had also himself undergone the baptism of fire, escaped the snares of his wife, reappeared under the name of Selivanov, performed many miracles and converted multitudes, obtained as a reward the knout, and was at last sent to Siberia. Emperor Paul recalled him and was converted by him. Under Alexander I. he was again arrested and imprisoned in the cloister of Suzdal. But he was conveyed thence by a divine miracle to Irkutzk, where he now lives in secret, whence at his own time he shall return to judge the living and the dead.—They kept up an outward connection with the state church although they regarded it as the apocalyptic whore of Babylon. In their own secret services inspired psalms were sung, and after exciting dances prophecies were uttered.567