the visit of an English physician to Moscow in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, who introduced the reading and study of the Bible. It would appear that it is more owing to this Bible study by Russians themselves than to any direct Protestant evangelisation that they came to adopt scriptural ideas of Christianity. And yet the thorough protestantism of the confession of faith they presented to the government shows that the same ideas were in them that were working in the continental Calvinists and English Puritans. This confession concludes with the following statement: "Besides the holy sacraments, we accept the Word of God and inward faith as our guides. We do not consider ourselves as not sinful, nor as holy, but work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, in the hope of attaining it solely, and alone, through belief in Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, and the fulfilment of the commands of the Lord; we have no power of ourselves to effect this, but obtain it only through living faith in our intercessor and redeemer, Jesus Christ."[1] Nothing could be more completely evangelical than that. Even the reference to the sacraments refers only to their symbolical character.
Mr. Wallace gives us an interesting account of the Molokans drawn up from personal enquiries among members of the sect. The results of the enquiries agree in the main with what we learn from other sources. They show that these people take for their model the early Apostolic Church as depicted in the New Testament, and reject all later authorities. They have no hierarchy and no paid clergy. Each congregation chooses one presbyter and two assistants, who must be men of exemplary life well acquainted with the Scriptures, and whose duty it is to take pastoral oversight of the religious and moral welfare of the flock. They meet on Sundays in private houses—church-building by heretics being forbidden—and spend two or three hours in singing, prayer, reading of Scripture, and conference on religious topics. A member will state some
- ↑ Haxthausen, The Russian Empire (trans. by R. Farie, 1856), quoted by Heard, p. 276.
