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THE STUNDISTS.

movement. Dangers now began to thicken around the leaders. Their footsteps were dogged from place to place; scores of times they were in gaol for longer or shorter periods; as soon as their object was known to priests and police, steps were at once taken to counteract their action. Newly-appointed presbyters and deacons would be moved about from place to place by "administrative" order of the local authorities, not permitted to settle for any time in any one district. The lists containing the names of the brethren were frequently seized by the police, and with these in their possession the authorities at any moment could put their hands on any one they suspected, and accuse him or her of defection from the Orthodox Church. Scores of Stundists were put in gaol for no other reason save that their names were on these lists. But notwithstanding every effort made to repress Stundism, notwithstanding the continuous thwarting of the plans of its leaders, the wonderful peasant revolt grew and strengthened all through the years before 1880; and from the confusion and disorder into which they were plunged, both by their own ignorance and by the hostility of the government, there slowly emerged a fairly organised and cohesive Church, its parts well in touch one with another, all of them acting together in tolerable unison. We hear of no rivalries among the leaders. Although, as was to be expected, shades and divergences of view crept in, although the brethren in Bessarabia, for instance, could not see eye to eye with those in Kief and Kherson, they never dreamed of withholding their sympathies from one another, or of rejecting the ministrations of those who, differing from them in non-essentials, yet held the grand cardinal doctrines of their common Protestant faith.

Perhaps a more serious division in the ranks of the Protestants was made by the appearance of Baptist preachers among them. Stundism as we know it now is composed of