THE BAPTIST CHAPEL
I HAVE continually come across Protestants in Russia. They are
undoubtedly increasing in numbers very rapidly. Several times when I was
out in the mountains I came across proselytising Baptists and Molokans.
The Molokan is a sect of Protestant exclusively Russian, I think. They
differ from orthodox peasants by their ethics. They hold it a sin to
smoke or to drink, and they do not recognise the Ikons. Even in
Lisitchansk there had been a Baptist family, and in Moscow I had found
Lutherans.
M. Stolypin’s ukase marked the decease of Pan-Slavism, that policy
summarised in the words—one Tsar, one Tongue, one Church. It was
comparatively little noticed, this Emancipation Bill of Russia, but it
will probably prove a more important concession to the forces of
Democracy than any other fruit of the Revolutionary struggle. It began a
new era: historians in the future will take it as a starting-point in
the history of Russian freedom. Meanwhile, despite rumours to the
contrary, Russia as a whole is as peaceful as Bedfordshire. The
Revolutionary storm has passed away; the new issues of life and death
germinate in silence. The flushed red fruit burst out, the seeds were
scattered. To-day the seeds gather strength and grow and put forth
shoots, and even the ordinary observer is aware of the beginning of a
crop whose nature is sufficiently enigmatical. On another day there will
be another harvest. And if Elizabethan Puritans meant ultimately the
Whitehall gallows, one may ask apprehensively for the significance of
the Puritanism that is springing into existence in the reign of Nicholas
II.
I was talking to the pastor one evening shortly after I came.
“We increase, brother,” said he to me, “we increase. Three years ago
there were only 120 of us and now we are 300; in three more years we
shall be half a thousand, not less.”
“But is it not dangerous?” I said. “Surely you come into conflict with
the authorities.”
“Not much now. Three of us were hanged two years ago. And often meetings
are forbidden. The last Governor forbade our meetings altogether; that
was ten years ago. Many of us suffered through that; some are in prison
now and some died in prison. But we held our meetings despite the ukase
of the Governor. We used to gather together at a friend’s house, and
then after tea we would have our few hymns and a prayer or two. These
meetings were generally very happy, the common bond of danger made us
closer than brothers.”
“And you?” I asked. “Were you ever arrested?”
“Yes, with four others one night; two of them died in prison, they were
old men and it was hard on them. I served five years’ penal servitude.
That was for holding a meeting against the order.”
The minister was silent as if recalling old memories, and then suddenly
he went on as if brushing aside his thoughts. “But things are quieter
now. In all Russia there are twenty thousand Baptists alone, besides
many thousand other Protestants, and we are added to in numbers every
year. In Rostof a little congregation has become three thousand since
the Duma came in. And now dotted all over the country we have little
missions among the peasants; it’s the peasants who’re coming to us, and
nobody else has been able to teach them. Every year new missions start.
Next month I make my little country tour, when the harvesters are in the
fields, and I go to five new places—five places to which the Gospel has
come this year.”
On the very first Sunday morning comes my host to warn me not to be late
for service. I prepared to go to chapel seriously; it was long since I
had been in any place of worship other than a temple of the Orthodox
Church.
Half a mile distant I found the building, the little defiant, heterodox
place so brave in its denial and protest. Here was no church, not even a
chapel, just a plain wooden building. This black, gaunt building, less
beautiful and less ornamented than a house. God dwells in those
jewelled, perfumed caskets of the Orthodox Church; He dwells here also.
How well and how daringly the paradox had been asserted! And they called
it a meeting, not a service, and it was held upstairs and not down; and
instead of standing all through one sat all through, and there were no
crosses and no ornaments and no collections, and the women sat on one
side while the men sat on the other.
The room was large. Wooden forms ranged on each side, there was a narrow
passage down the middle, and at the head of it stood the preacher’s
platform, slightly elevated from the people. The whole looked somewhat
like a chapel schoolroom.
The congregation was in its way quite a grand one. Not that it was by
any means numerous; the little place was full, one couldn’t say more
than that. But there wasn’t a woman dressed in anything finer than
printed cotton, and the minister was the only man who wore a collar.
Something in the people called out one’s reverence. Each woman had a
cotton shawl for head-dress, and as the women’s side filled one looked
along a vista of shawled heads, and when now and then one of them turned
to look at a stranger one saw the broad-browed, pale face of a peasant
woman.
They were all peasant folk, or working men or artisans, and very simple
and earnest. One knew much of them when one heard the words of their
elected pastor. Ivan Savelev, when he came in, walked directly to his
place and knelt, and then after a few minutes’ silence closed his prayer
by a few words spoken on behalf of the congregation—gentle, simple
words, such as a mother might put into the mouth of her child. He is a
tall, douce man, the minister, of a Scottish type of countenance. His
calm face and eyes suggest an infinite reserve of wisdom, and his
gentle, musical voice tells of a mind and will in harmony. Presently he
read from the Bible, and then gave out a hymn, and afterwards spoke from
a text, first to the women, then to the men, and then to both
collectively, and then gave out another hymn. What struck me was that he
did each thing as if it were worth while, so that the numbers of the
hymns sounded beautifully.
The people sang with a will and kept in tune. The pastor, after giving
out the number, stepped over to the harmonium and played a tune. He is
choir-master as well as preacher, and teaches his people new tunes from
two books of his own—_Hymns, Ancient and Modern_, and an old copy of
_Moody and Sankey_; priceless treasures, one would say, though the
printed English words remain inscrutable. We went off to the tune of
“See the conquering hero comes,” the Russian words seeming very
irrelevant. When the tune was in full swing one really felt oneself back
in England—old memories crowded to my mind. Just before the sermon there
was another hymn, and this to the tune of “Oh, God, our help in ages
past;” but a presto motif, and a quaint alteration in the phrasing of
the tune, reminded one of peals of church bells. They sang it as if the
lines ran:
“Oh, God, our help in ages past our
Hope for years to come.
Our Shelter from the stormy blast and
Our Eternal home.”
The pastor’s sermon was direct; to him the issue was clear. Not alone
those who say “_Gospody, Gospody_,” but those who do the will of my
Father shall enter into the Kingdom. He counselled them to lead earnest,
sober lives, and to bring up their families in the truth. Everyone
listened in resolute stillness. One felt their God in the midst of
them—the God of the Puritans.
I found my thoughts straying back to England, and I wondered if I saw
before me a picture of what the early Independents or early Methodists
were like. I was accustomed to chapels in London where each person
belongs to our advanced civilisation, and where the preacher hands more
than the simple bread of life. Here each man was of the crude, rough
material out of which civilisations are made. Here was a passion for
simplicity; everything was elemental, original. There were strange, new
silences to be divined below the voices and the sounds, strange
barenesses and nakednesses underneath the scanty nature of the service.
For a moment one shut one’s eyes to the room, and opened other eyes to
another scene—to the stable and the manger and the straw. Yes, here were
the beginnings of things.
After service I walked home with the pastor. “You will become a
political force,” I said. “Who knows?” he replied. “I hope not, but we
increase in numbers. Everyone added to us is one added to the forces of
truth and purity.”
Some pilgrims passed us. “There they go,” he said, “hundred of miles to
pray to God in an ancient monastery. God is there, He is not here, so
they say. They go to pray, and they waste their money and their time,
and it all ends in vodka drinking. God grant they may become less and
less.”
The pilgrims retreated, staff in hand, hooded and with great bundles on
their backs. Slowly, as it were, reluctantly, they moved away, and to me
they seemed the living figure of the past, and this fresh, strong man
beside me was the new.
“You are laying the foundation of a Russian democracy,” I went on. “In
England or America you would see a democracy three hundred years ahead
of this. Have you heard of the London slums, or of Chicago? Are you not
afraid of the responsibility?”
He smiled. “Three hundred years is a long time, brother. We teach the
truth. If your people have gone wrong it was because they turned away,
they took wrong turnings. It is God’s will that we preach and spread the
truth.”
Ivan Savelev carried himself with the air of one who had uttered an
unquestionable truism. His truths were his own, and for him
indisputable. I left him and went to meditate on the secret life I had
discovered.
It moves silently and unseen, like running water under snow, and on
countless hillsides and valleys and plains the spring movement has
begun. One day Russia will awake and find the season new. Then there
will come another autumn and another harvest, and the good seed will be
found to have multiplied thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and some an hundredfold.
[Illustration: DEVDORAK GLACIER, GORGE OF DARIEL]
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