two great divisions, one adhering to infant, the other to adult baptism. By far the greater number, probably more than two-thirds, are adherents of the doctrine of infant baptism. We first hear of Russian Baptists in connection with this movement as early as 1865. They were the spiritual children of the German Baptists Pritzkau, Wieler, and others. These first converts were insignificant men, who played no part of any prominence in the future history of the movement; but it was not long before others of greater importance joined the Baptists, attracted, doubtless, by their greater strictness of rule, and their more hostile and militant attitude towards the Orthodox Church. Foremost among these were Balaban of Kherson, and Kapustinski of Kief. Others who joined and greatly influenced them were Zimbal of Karlovka, and Trophim Khlistoun—men of saintly lives, who prayed in quiet, and whose lives were sermons not made with words. Khlistoun was, however, not always quiet. When he chose he was a most powerful speaker, and between 1870 and 1875 did some useful evangelistic work all over the South of Russia. Those who have heard him preach speak of his great oratorical powers, of how he swayed his hearers to passion or to prayer, to thanksgiving or to revolt, to the loftiest heights of spiritual ecstasy or to lowest depths of humiliation.[1] There can be little doubt that the Baptist movement was a distinct advantage to Stundism. It did much to make the ordinary Russian Protestant more vertebrate. Until the Baptist set his face sternly against the Orthodox Church, and all its corruptions and defilements, the Stundist was satisfied to steer
diplomatically between his new and his old faith. Afraid of
- ↑ A few months ago, Khlistoun was banished to a remote and inhospitable part of the Caucasus, where he has suffered great hardships and poverty. Kapustinski was banished nearly five years ago, and is now only a wreck of the man he was when he roused the peasants of Kief to their revolt against the formalism and slavery of the Russian Church.
