We stand as the guardians of a sacred inheritance. Our Scriptures, our liturgical books, and the sacred manuscripts passed down from our holy forefathers are not curiosities to be stored away, nor museum pieces to be admired from afar. They are living witnesses. They are the written memory of the true Church, preserved without adulteration, bearing the breath of the Holy Spirit, and soaked in the tears and blood of those who refused to bow to innovation and apostasy.
When those under the leadership of Patriarch Nikon, supported by the iron fist of Tsarist absolutism, began to tamper with the very texts that had nourished the Russian Church for centuries, they did not undertake a scholarly correction—they committed treason against the Apostolic Tradition. Their revisions were not innocent clarifications, but mutilations of the sacred. They touched what no man has the right to touch—the prayers of the saints, the chants of the divine offices, and the Holy Scriptures themselves. “Remove not the old landmarks, which thy fathers placed” (Proverbs 22:28, Brenton LXX), the Word of God declares. But these innovators, filled not with zeal for truth but with ambition and impiety, set their hands against the landmarks that our fathers set with blood, fasting, and tears.
The Psalter, which had been faithfully preserved in the Septuagint tradition and the Church Slavonic translation from it, was violently altered to conform to the Masoretic Hebrew. In their madness, they preferred the tradition of the synagogue after the destruction of the Temple over the tradition of the undivided Church. In so doing, they rejected the Psalms as the Apostles knew them. This is no small matter. The Psalter is the beating heart of Orthodox prayer; to corrupt it is to sever the arteries of the Church’s inner life.
The Typikon, the very order of our liturgical life, carefully built up through centuries of ascetic refinement in the great monastic houses of the Russian land, was recklessly revised. Services were reordered, fasts adjusted, commemorations obscured or omitted. Uniformity was imposed where holy diversity had once thrived. The organic unity between rite and theology was broken. All this was done in the name of “correctness,” as defined not by the mind of the Fathers, but by the whims of those who had fallen under Greek and Latin influence.
But worse still—yes, worse—they tampered with the name of our Saviour in the sacred prayers. The Old Rite preserved the usage of Isus (Ісусъ), a name sanctified in our hymnody, icons, and ascetic literature. The reformers replaced it with Iisus (Іисусъ), a form foreign to our tradition, introduced under the pretext of grammatical correctness. This change, though it may appear minor to the uninstructed, is of immense theological and mystical significance. The holy name is not a sound to be manipulated by scholars—it is a mystery to be venerated. The demons fear the very syllables of that Name. To alter it without divine authority is to blaspheme.
This rationalism—the religion of the mind over the faith of the heart—infected the entire reform movement. Their concern was not for the living experience of the Church, but for paper concordances and Greek manuscripts, some of them corrupt. They abandoned the living breath of the Church in favour of academic systems. They treated the sacred not as holy tradition received from the Fathers, but as a thing to be dissected and corrected like some faulty mechanical device. Thus, these men were not reformers. They were usurpers. Their actions were not corrections, but desecrations. Like Uzzah who dared touch the Ark and was struck down (2 Samuel 6:6–7), they laid their defiled hands upon the holy things and incurred spiritual death. And having committed this crime, they turned upon the faithful who resisted them—burning our books, destroying our churches, and slaughtering our people. The synods were turned into tribunals, and the Tsar became a new Pilate, washing his hands while his officers nailed Christ anew by persecuting His true servants.
The Old Believers stood firm—not because we loved controversy, but because we loved the truth. We saw that the Apostolic Tradition was being crucified, and we refused to be complicit. To us, the holy books are not to be adjusted to suit imperial tastes or Greek innovations. They are to be revered, guarded, and lived. For what is at stake is not a syllable here or a rubric there—it is the very faith once delivered unto the saints (Jude 1:3).
We did not rebel for rebellion’s sake. Our stand was not born of pride or stubbornness, as our slanderers have claimed. We were not schismatics, but confessors. We did not oppose the Church; we opposed those who dared to defile her. The battle we entered was not for preference or custom, but for the integrity of the Apostolic faith. To surrender the sacred texts is not a harmless concession—it is to open the gate to every heresy and every deception. For the faith of the Church is not abstract. It is transmitted in words, rites, and prayers sanctified by centuries of usage and sealed by the blood of martyrs and the sweat of ascetics. What use is it to confess the Creed if the Creed itself is rewritten to suit a new fashion or foreign theology? The moment men take liberty with the words of the faith, they take liberty with its meaning. Alter the form, and you undermine the content. That is why the Creed, composed by the Fathers of Nicaea and Constantinople, was fixed—not to be tampered with. Yet the reformers showed no such reverence. They adjusted wording, suppressed traditional expressions, and imported foreign interpretations—all in the name of aligning with the Greeks who themselves had fallen under various influences.
What benefit is it to chant the Psalms if the Psalms are mutilated? The Psalms are not poetic ornaments. They are the voice of the Church in prayer, theology sung before the altar of God. They are the song of Christ Himself, for He fulfilled them in His Passion and Resurrection. But the reformers, scorning the Church’s reliance on the Septuagint, turned instead to the Masoretic text, riddled with post-Christian revisions. They departed from the practice of the Apostles and introduced confusion into the heart of our worship.
The holy Apostle Paul exhorts us: “Hold the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me in faith, and in the love which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 1:13). Note well—the form of sound words, not only the content. For in holy tradition, form and content are not separable. The language of prayer is not interchangeable with secular speech. It is consecrated by use and shaped by the Spirit. Change the form, and you distort the faith. The reformers, with their scissors and ink, acted as if they were above the Apostles, above the Councils, above the saints. Their arrogance was spiritual blindness. They called their violations “corrections.” They claimed to bring us closer to the “original” or the “universal.” But what they truly brought was the spirit of compromise and betrayal. Their improvements bore the stench of union with Rome, whose errors they quietly mirrored, and the foul odour of Enlightenment rationalism, where man exalts his reason over divine revelation. They disdained the mystical, the poetic, the sacred cadence of the Slavonic tongue as it had been blessed by usage in the divine services. They scoffed at tradition and preferred the sterile precision of human systems. But our God is not served by such arrogance. “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25), and the old books, kept in trembling hands by generations of faithful monks and laymen, contain more holiness than a library of the reformers’ scribbles.
Let no one say we divided the Church. It was the reformers who introduced novelty, and novelty is the first mark of heresy. We remained where we always were—clinging to the true texts, preserving the sacred order, resisting the tide of betrayal. We did not change. They did. We held fast. They let go. And for that fidelity, we were cast out, burned, hunted, and mocked. So be it. The martyrs of old were likewise treated. And we shall remain, God helping us, the remnant who keep the word of Christ and the liturgy unspoiled.
In the face of mockery, torture, exile, and martyrdom, our forefathers bore the sacred books not as one carries possessions, but as one carries holy relics—clutched to the bosom, hidden beneath garments, wept over in the dark, and kissed with trembling lips. When the imperial authorities and the Nikonian clergy unleashed their campaign of spiritual and physical violence against us, our ancestors became confessors and martyrs not by choice, but by necessity. They fled across forests thick with wolves, over mountains veiled in snow, and across frozen rivers, not for survival alone, but to safeguard the uncorrupted word of God and the divine services as handed down from the Fathers.
They built hidden sketes in the wilderness, not to escape men, but to preserve God’s truth untainted. In these humble refuges, dug into the earth or carved into mountainsides, they laboured by candlelight to copy the sacred books by hand—Psalters, Horologia, Menaia, Gospels, and Typika. Illiterate peasants learned to form letters so that the chants of the Church would not be silenced. Monastics wrote with frozen fingers and bloodied hands, knowing that to be found with such texts was to invite flogging, imprisonment, or death. Their script was not merely ink—it was their confession of faith. Some, seeing that capture was inevitable, set fire to their own chapels and perished in the flames rather than hand over the holy books to be defiled by the apostates. This was not suicide, but martyrdom. They chose death over desecration, like the Maccabean mother and her sons who chose torture over eating swine’s flesh (2 Maccabees 7). Their burnt bodies bore witness that the faith is not something to be negotiated. Their ashes are our inheritance, and their smoke ascended as incense before the throne of God.
The blood of these martyrs cries out against the adulterers of the Church—those who bowed to the Tsar, those who mutilated the sacred services, those who trampled on the Gospel in the name of state-approved “unity.” They sold the faith for imperial favour. They were not shepherds, but hirelings who fled when the wolves came (John 10:12–13). Our forebears, by contrast, stood firm. They bore shame before men so as not to incur shame before Christ. They knew that fidelity to the sacred texts is fidelity to the Incarnate Word Himself. Shall we then, their descendants, treat these same books with neglect or irreverence? Shall we leave them to mould on dusty shelves, or replace them with mass-printed volumes bearing corrupted rites? God forbid. To neglect the sacred books is to spit upon the sacrifice of the martyrs. It is to say their blood was shed in vain. Every time we open a hand-copied Old Rite Psalter, we hear their voices. Every time we chant the stichera in the tone they preserved, we stand in their company. To read from the unaltered Gospel is to partake in the very defiance by which they overcame the world.
Their memory imposes a sacred duty. We must preserve, safeguard, copy, chant, teach, and revere these texts with holy fear. The books are not ours to modernise—they are entrusted to us as a sacred deposit. Woe to us if we become careless. Woe to us if we prioritise convenience over faithfulness. If we betray the sacred books, we become like those who killed the prophets and stoned them that were sent unto them (Matthew 23:37).
Let us then keep vigil with these books. Let us hold them as our forefathers held them—tightly, reverently, and with the knowledge that they are the living memory of the undivided Church. As it is written, “And the book of this law shall not depart out of thy mouth, and thou shalt meditate in it day and night, that thou mayest know how to do all the things that are written in it; then shalt thou prosper, and make thy ways prosperous, and then shalt thou be wise” (Joshua 1:8). If we do so, the God of our fathers will not abandon us, for we have not abandoned His word.
We must preserve them—not only physically, but liturgically and spiritually. A book unused is as good as a book burnt. It must be read in the services, sung on the lips of the faithful, and engraved upon the heart. It is written: “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psalm 118:11 LXX; Psalm 119:11). Let this be our aim: not the empty preservation of artefacts, but the living use of holy tradition.
Our sacred texts are more than ink on vellum. They are not museum relics nor literary curiosities—they are the very vessels of divine grace, the breath of the Church made visible in writing. Within these hand-copied lines of Slavonic, ornamented with crosses, diacritical signs, and red rubrics, lives the spirit of ancient Orthodoxy as it existed before the apostasy of the 17th century. They are the distilled piety of a thousand years—the fasting of monks, the tears of elders, the hymnody of unceasing vigils, the psalmody echoing in wooden chapels across Holy Rus’. To preserve them is not optional—it is the fulfilment of our oath before God and the continuation of our baptismal confession.
These texts contain more than doctrine—they bear the very rhythm of Orthodox life. They teach us how to pray, how to keep the feasts, how to honour the saints, how to repent, and how to die in Christ. Every word, every accent, every cadence is a thread in the seamless garment of the Church. To discard or alter them is to unravel that garment and mock the Bride of Christ. When we speak of the Lenten Triodion, the Pentecostarion, the Irmologion, the Typikon, the Psalter—we are speaking not of “books,” but of holy structures of life, each one breathed into being by the Spirit working through the saints and sealed by the consensus of generations. There is no Orthodoxy apart from this inheritance. It is our Ark in the flood of apostasy.
We are not “a group” or a “sect.” We are the true Orthodox Church of Russia—those who have not bowed the knee to Baal (1 Kings 19:18), nor kissed the hand of the apostate clergy who betrayed the sacred tradition for imperial convenience. We are the spiritual sons of Saint Avvakum, of the nameless women who carried Psalters in their shawls and buried themselves with the old service books rather than submit to the impious reforms. Our Church does not bear the stain of syncretism. We do not mix east and west like the Ecumenists, nor do we dilute the faith with modern sentimentality or academic scepticism. We stand where the Church stood for a thousand years, unmoved by the storms of heresy, schism, or novelty. Let the world mock us. Let them call us fanatics, reactionaries, fundamentalists. What of it? “ If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). Better to be a fanatic in the eyes of this fallen world than to be counted among the rationalisers and innovators who mutilate the faith in order to please bishops, statesmen, and theologians. The martyrs were mocked as madmen, the prophets were scorned, the saints were treated as fools. Yet the wisdom of God is not judged by this world. It is written: “We are fools for Christ’s sake” (1 Corinthians 4:10).
To compromise on the sacred texts is to compromise on the very faith. Every so-called “adjustment” or “update” to accommodate modern ears is a betrayal—not only of the content, but of the spirit by which the Church breathes. We do not need the approval of scholars or the applause of ecumenical councils contaminated by worldliness. We need fidelity—to the old books, to the old rites, to the old fasts, and to the old path which alone leads to life.
Let us then carry these texts in our hands and in our hearts, read them with reverence, chant them with exactitude, copy them with tears, and hand them down to our children as the greatest treasure on earth. For as long as the sacred texts of Holy Rus’ remain in use, the true Church of Russia lives, even in exile, even in caves, even under persecution. And when the Judge returns, He shall not ask whether we pleased men, but whether we preserved what was entrusted. “Be thou faithful until death: and I will give thee the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10).
Let us therefore, beloved, honour the sacred books, copy them, chant them, kiss them, and pass them to our children and their children after them. Let us be found faithful when the Lord cometh. For it is written: “Blessed is he, that readeth and heareth the words of this prophecy; and keepeth those things which are written in it; for the time is at hand” (Revelation 1:3). So may we be numbered among the faithful, and not the apostate.
— Fr. Charles