CHAPTER IV.
CLOSING UP THE RANKS.
From 1873 to 1880 the onward progress of the movement we have called Stundism was extraordinary : hut it was confined within certain well-defined geographical limits. As soon as it reached the furthest bounds of the provinces inhabited by the Little Russians, and touched the territory of the Great Russians, it received a check. The stolid, phlegmatic, and somewhat stupid Great Russian evinced little or no sympathy with the Protestant tenets, and held stubbornly to his orthodoxy, while hundreds of thousands of the imaginative and sympathetic peasants of the Ukraine and the Southern steppes were in a ferment of religious enthusiasm. A curious contrast might be drawn between this state of affairs in Russia and the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Then it was the imaginative and æsthetic nations of Europe,—Italians, Spaniards, and South Germans, who offered a stubborn resistance to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin. It was the heavy, slow-thinking nations of the North,—Germans and Scandinavians, who were the strength of the Protestant movement of three hundred years ago.
It will be useful, therefore, if we endeavour to mark out with greater precision the limits which Stundism reached in 1875, limits beyond which it did not appreciably advance during the next eighteen years, or until the present time. Beginning in the West in central Poland about the fifty-third parallel of latitude, and following a straight line eastwards,
