I HAVE continually come across Protestants in Russia. They are undoubtedly increasing in numbers very rapidly. Several times when I was out in the mountains I came across proselytising Baptists and Molokans. The Molokan is a sect of Protestant exclusively Russian, I think. They differ from orthodox peasants by their ethics. They hold it a sin to smoke or to drink, and they do not recognise the Ikons. Even in Lisitchansk there had been a Baptist family, and in Moscow I had found Lutherans.
M. Stolypin’s ukase marked the decease of Pan-Slavism, that policy summarised in the words—one Tsar, one Tongue, one Church. It was comparatively little noticed, this Emancipation Bill of Russia, but it will probably prove a more important concession to the forces of Democracy than any other fruit of the Revolutionary struggle. It began a new era: historians in the future will take it as a starting-point in the history of Russian freedom. Meanwhile, despite rumours to the contrary, Russia as a whole is as peaceful 236as Bedfordshire. The Revolutionary storm has passed away; the new issues of life and death germinate in silence. The flushed red fruit burst out, the seeds were scattered. To-day the seeds gather strength and grow and put forth shoots, and even the ordinary observer is aware of the beginning of a crop whose nature is sufficiently enigmatical. On another day there will be another harvest. And if Elizabethan Puritans meant ultimately the Whitehall gallows, one may ask apprehensively for the significance of the Puritanism that is springing into existence in the reign of Nicholas II.
I was talking to the pastor one evening shortly after I came.
“We increase, brother,” said he to me, “we increase. Three years ago there were only 120 of us and now we are 300; in three more years we shall be half a thousand, not less.”
“But is it not dangerous?” I said. “Surely you come into conflict with the authorities.”
“Not much now. Three of us were hanged two years ago. And often meetings are forbidden. The last Governor forbade our meetings altogether; that was ten years ago. Many of us suffered through that; some are in prison now and some died in prison. But we held our meetings despite the ukase of the Governor. We used to gather together at a friend’s house, and then after tea we would have our few hymns and a prayer or two. These meetings were generally very happy, the 237common bond of danger made us closer than brothers.”
“And you?” I asked. “Were you ever arrested?”
“Yes, with four others one night; two of them died in prison, they were old men and it was hard on them. I served five years’ penal servitude. That was for holding a meeting against the order.”
The minister was silent as if recalling old memories, and then suddenly he went on as if brushing aside his thoughts. “But things are quieter now. In all Russia there are twenty thousand Baptists alone, besides many thousand other Protestants, and we are added to in numbers every year. In Rostof a little congregation has become three thousand since the Duma came in. And now dotted all over the country we have little missions among the peasants; it’s the peasants who’re coming to us, and nobody else has been able to teach them. Every year new missions start. Next month I make my little country tour, when the harvesters are in the fields, and I go to five new places—five places to which the Gospel has come this year.”
On the very first Sunday morning comes my host to warn me not to be late for service. I prepared to go to chapel seriously; it was long since I had been in any place of worship other than a temple of the Orthodox Church.
Half a mile distant I found the building, the little defiant, heterodox place so brave in its denial and protest. 238Here was no church, not even a chapel, just a plain wooden building. This black, gaunt building, less beautiful and less ornamented than a house. God dwells in those jewelled, perfumed caskets of the Orthodox Church; He dwells here also. How well and how daringly the paradox had been asserted! And they called it a meeting, not a service, and it was held upstairs and not down; and instead of standing all through one sat all through, and there were no crosses and no ornaments and no collections, and the women sat on one side while the men sat on the other.
The room was large. Wooden forms ranged on each side, there was a narrow passage down the middle, and at the head of it stood the preacher’s platform, slightly elevated from the people. The whole looked somewhat like a chapel schoolroom.
The congregation was in its way quite a grand one. Not that it was by any means numerous; the little place was full, one couldn’t say more than that. But there wasn’t a woman dressed in anything finer than printed cotton, and the minister was the only man who wore a collar. Something in the people called out one’s reverence. Each woman had a cotton shawl for head-dress, and as the women’s side filled one looked along a vista of shawled heads, and............