The Stundists/Preface
PREFACE.
In the second half of last century, and again in the second half of this, Southern Russia has been the scene of widespread revolt, the first political, the second religious, both revolts taking place very much in the same latitude, only that one took its rise east of the Volga and the other in the provinces west of that great river. De Quincey, in his own picturesque fashion, has told the story of the first—the revolt of the Kalmuck Tartars in 1771; showing how, because of the oppression of Russia, her pride and haughty disdain towards them, her contempt for their religion, and her determination to reduce them to absolute slavery, this Tartar people, a vast multitude of six hundred thousand souls, burnt their homesteads and started across the wilderness in search of a land of freedom some three thousand miles away.
The great revolt of our own time is that of a people leaving, not the territory, but the religion of the Russian Empire. The story of this second revolt is here told for us with great vividness and power by one who is exceptionally qualified for the task, as being probably better acquainted with the Stundists than any one else who has written about them. It is a story of deepest interest, one that ought to come close home to every Christian heart, and both writer and publisher are rendering eminent service to the sacred cause of religious freedom and humanity by letting the facts be known far and wide. Yonder in the neighbourhood of Kherson, where our great philanthropist John Howard fell before the plague in 1790, and where he lies buried, the Stundist movement took its rise some five and thirty years ago. The cause of its rise is an old and oft-repeated story in the history of Christianity. The official, State-recognised Church had become corrupt, had sunk into worldliness and death; gross immoralities and sensual lives on the part of the clergy had brought religion into uttermost contempt, when, at length, in the most unexpected way the breath of God began to breathe life among the dead. For even a corrupt Church cannot altogether keep God out of His own world or shut Christ out from the souls for which He died. The Stundist movement, as its name implies, had a German origin. As far back as 1778 the great Empress Catherine had colonised Kherson with peasants from the Suabian land, who brought with them their religion, their pastors, and their industrious, sober ways. For many years national prejudices and the barriers of language kept Russians and Germans apart from each other. But sooner or later true life begins to tell. Men may even doubt the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, but they are seldom found doubting the divine inspiration of consistency of life, unselfishness of spirit, and true brotherly service. Some of the Russian peasants who had been helped in their poverty or ministered to in their sickness by their German neighbours began to attend their services—to keep the stunden, or hours, of praise and prayer; they learned to read, were furnished with the New Testament in their own language, and eventually some of them found the deeper blessing of eternal life. In this simple scriptural fashion this memorable movement began. Men told their neighbours what God had done for their souls, and so the heavenly contagion spread from cottage to cottage, from village to village, and from province to province, till at length the Russian Stundists were found in all the provinces from the boundaries of the Austrian Empire in the West to the land of the Don Cossack in the East, and were supposed to number something like a quarter-of-a-million souls.
The course of this remarkable development of religious life, the eminent men raised up in connection with the movement, the gradual elevation of the people, their opinions and church organisation, and the terrible storm of persecution with which they have been assailed—all this and more is strikingly told in the papers that follow. The story reads like one from the records of the primitive Church. The brutal sufferings inflicted on the one side, and the heroic constancy manifested on the other, may well touch every heart among us. De Quincey says that in the consequences that followed the revolt of the Tartars in 1771 Europe was called to witness the spectacle of a nation in its agony. This is true of the sufferings of the Stundists of to-day, and calls for the indignant protest of every right-feeling man and woman in this Christian land. Stolid and defiant as Russian officialism may seem to be, that protest will not be in vain. M. Pobiedonostyeff, the High Procureur of the Holy Synod, who is supposed to be responsible for the atrocities described in these pages, may be as blindly fanatical as was Saul of Tarsus, thinking he is doing God service, and he may be all-powerful as an ecclesiastic, but he is not too blind to see the storm signal on our shores or too powerful to feel the force of the indignation of Western Christendom when it is once fairly roused. Nations are vastly nearer to each other in these days of the Press and of swiftly-flying intelligence than they were a century ago, and even the strongest nation must yield at length to that love of justice and right which, in the last resort, is stronger than battalions and mightier than the edicts of kings. We can all do something to create an enlightened public opinion, and we can all bear these suffering brethren and sisters on our hearts in prayer before God.
JOHN BROWN.
Bedford.