The Stundists/Chapter 1
THE STUNDISTS.
CHAPTER I.
BEGINNINGS.
Not far from the banks of the Boug river, on the softly-undulating steppes of the fertile province of Kherson, stands the insignificant Russian village of Osnova, a collection of low, white cottages, with little farmyards around them, and beyond and on all sides illimitable plains of waving wheat. There are numerous villages not far away, all like Osnova in appearance, with the same people, the same low huts and dirty haggards, and oceans of corn surrounding them, but none so famous, none so interesting to the student of religious history, for here, exactly thirty-five years ago, a great movement first saw the light, a mighty movement that may perhaps revolutionise the whole of the religious and social life of ninety millions of people.
The origin and first beginnings of this movement, which eventually acquired the name of Stundism, are involved in a good deal of uncertainty; but sufficient is known to enable us to form a tolerably accurate notion of the causes which led up to the greatest religious revolt of modern times. These are two-fold—one cause, the utter lifelessness of the Russian Orthodox Church; the other—an external cause—the increased spiritual life among the Germans settled in numerous colonies over the greater portion of Southern Russia. To get at the real origin of Stundism we must inquire a little into both of these. The Russian Church, which had been galvanised into unhealthy activity by its fratricidal conflict with the Old Believers in the reign of Peter the Great, had, after its victory over these heretics, sunk into utter inanity and empty ceremonialism. Uncontrolled by any effective oversight of their training and conduct, the clergy had ceased to be anything more than dull and extortionate collectors of church fees. They led gross lives of drunkenness and immorality, unredeemed by any spark of religious life. They were despised by the meanest of their flocks, and ignorant to a proverb. Their homes, instead of being models of purity and family concord, had become objects of scorn; and a priest, a priest's wife and children, a priest's farm, a priest's cottage, were synonymous with intemperance, slatternliness, thriftlessness, and dirt. On the other hand, the Russian peasants of the South, a race altogether distinct in sentiment and imagination from the phlegmatic people of the Central and Northern provinces—Little Russians as they are called—had examples before their eyes of men leading upright, God-fearing lives, modelling their conduct on New Testament teachings, cleanly, thrifty, able agriculturists. These were their neighbours, the Germans. The Empress Catherine, who, whatever her faults as a woman, was a great ruler and a far-seeing administratrix, had invited a large number of Suabian peasants, who in their South German homes had been simmering with indignation against the corrupt rule of their time, to settle in her empire on fertile lands, which she measured out to them with no niggard hand. Most of them were members of revived Evangelical communions, deeply impressed with the nearness of the Second Advent, and they readily seized on Catherine's offer, as enabling them to be a stage nearer Jerusalem when that long-expected day should arrive. The piety, integrity and steadiness which distinguished them in their Würtemberg homes they transplanted to Russia. Out on the steppe they built their trim houses, surrounded them with fruit trees and flower gardens, and carefully tilled their land, raising splendid crops of wheat and barley. They brought their earnest pastors with them, and built commodious churches and schools. Clean and well dressed, they crowded the churches for the numerous services, and the schools were filled with their eager children. The colonies became little paradises on the steppe, and small wonder that the Russian's heart filled with bitterness when he looked on the brightness, purity, harmony and comparative opulence of the strangers' villages, and compared them with the disorder, dirt, drunkenness and discord in his own.
For many years after the arrival of the Germans in Russia, the two peoples kept rigorously aloof from one another; but little by little the stronger race began to acquire an influence over the weaker. The sick Russian would apply to the German apothecary, the impecunious Russian to the German money-lender, the beggars—and there were thousands of them came to the colonies—for alms, and crowds of wandering peasants, discharged soldiers, landless people sought and obtained employment from the affluent German farmers. It was in no stingy or superior way that these German Pietists treated their Russian dependents. The wealthy Russian is in the habit of looking on his poor fellow-countryman as belonging to an inferior order, with wants very similar to the wants of a horse—sufficient food and shelter to keep him able to work. The Germans treated their labourers as men and brothers, and not only attended to their material wants, but sought in every way to improve their moral and spiritual condition. It was with no deep design to effect a Reformation, no presentiment of what was coming, that the pious farmer, the day's work done, would sit side by side with his Russian workman, and German New Testament in hand, or book of German hymns, would laboriously translate for his tattered disciple the words of Christ, or the noble spiritual songs of the Vaterland. This was the attitude of the Germans in the colony of Rohrbach, a flourishing little place near the River Boug, and not very far from the great commercial city of Odessa. The pastor there was a certain Bonekemper, a man full of zeal, who not only laboured for the spiritual welfare of his own Germans, but for the enlightenment of their Russian dependents. He decided on taking two important steps. The Germans were in the habit of meeting together for prayer and praise at stated times. These exercises they called Stunden, or "hours." Bonekemper decided to invite the Russian labourers who had acquired a smattering of German to attend the Stunden. Here they first heard Protestant worship, and it was their attendance at these services that first earned for them the title of Stundists, a title of opprobrium attached to them by the Orthodox priests of the neighbourhood. Bonekemper's second step was to procure a supply of Russian New Testaments. These he readily obtained from German and English friends in St. Petersburg. To those of the Rohrbach labourers who promised to learn to read the energetic pastor made a present of a New Testament. Classes of Russians were formed; Germans taught them to read their own Russ language; writing was added; German tracts were distributed; there was ferment, and stir, and inquiry, and much searching of heart. This was in 1858, a memorable date, for it was the birth-year of Stundism.
A peasant who had been much in Rohrbach was I. Onislienko. He lived in Osnova, a Russian village in the neighbourhood, not very far from the port of Nicolaieff. He had been in the employ of various German farmers, and was one of the most devoted of those who attended the German Stunden, and one of the most diligent of the students of the New Testament. At this time he was thirty years old, a tall, meagre man, with childlike blue eyes, a pleasant mouth, and a ready gift of facile speech. Early in 1858 he declared himself converted, and was admitted to membership with the German brethren. Onislienko was, therefore, the first Stundist. Shortly after his conversion he returned to Osnova, and at once began evangelistic work among his fellow villagers. They met in his cottage in crowds, and to them he declared all that he himself knew, all that had worked so complete a reformation in his own heart. His preaching caught on. The state of preparedness was already there; the seed had been already sown. Onishenko had long singled out for special instruction a remarkable young man, whose gifts both of mind and heart were well known to him. He felt that if he could win young Michael Ratushni to the cause, he would gain one who would devote every energy he possessed to the spreading of the Gospel message. Ratushni was convinced and converted, and together with his teacher he went to Rohrbach to visit Bonekemper, and be received by the German brethren. As far as we can learn Ratushni's visits to Rohrbach were frequent, and there can be no doubt that he here obtained the instruction that was so indispensable in the prominent part he has since occupied as one of the foremost leaders of the Stundist revolt against the Orthodox Church of his country. In the meantime other evangelists, men who did useful and enduring work, but whose names have not been recorded, had been prepared in Rohrbach, Neu-Danzig, and other colonies, and returning to their own villages they spread the light that had illumined their own souls. In two years, or before 1860, there was hardly a Russian hamlet in the neighbourhood of Nicolaieff that had not its little company of earnest Stundists, teaching and praying, meeting together either openly or in secret, and zealously carrying forward a work dearer to them than life itself.
We now propose to carry on the history of this extraordinary movement a stage further, and to show how it streamed over the boundary of the province of Kherson into other districts of Russia.