Russian Life To-day

I hope to be able, when the war is over, to appoint a chaplain whose work it shall be to travel over those great spaces in European and Siberian Russia and visit very small communities where it is impossible for a permanent chaplain to find enough to do.

These will rapidly increase now as the country and its people become better known to us. The first Church of England Service ever taken in Siberia is a very good instance to give of such opportunities. It was in 1912, at Ekaterinburg, just beyond the Urals, and in the government of Perm, a large and growing town of 80,000 people, where our British community is represented almost entirely by one family named Yates, paper manufacturers, whose first mill was built there fifty years ago. It now consists of Mr. and Mrs. Yates, their brothers, children, and grandchildren.

Ekaterinburg is a distributing centre for the Bible Society, and their agent – earnest, energetic, and capable – is one of the best-known and respected Englishmen in Siberia. He it was who had prepared for my coming, arranged for me to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Yates, and invited every one within reach – “I’ve sounded the big drum,” he said – and with governesses, English wives of Russians, a young fellow and his wife teaching roller-skating, and one or two others – some having travelled long distances to get there – we must have numbered about thirty in all. They prepared a little temporary altar in the large drawing-room, with an ikon, flowers, etc., and we had Holy Communion, a morning and evening service, our dinner and supper together, and a priceless experience of the unity which thankfulness and fellowship always bring with them when realized in common prayer and worship.

From Ekaterinburg I went a day’s journey to another town, in a part of the country to which very few English travellers ever go, and there the small community consisted of one family only, though they were three generations. We were only a dozen altogether, and some might think it was hardly worth taking up a bishop’s time for three days to go and see one family. But the head of that family had been there between forty and fifty years, and never had our Church’s service during that time, nor received Communion. The grandchildren had never seen or heard the service before, and they were the children of a Russian father, attending a Russian school. I made my address simple so that they could understand it, knowing that the others could if the children did, and I had one or two opportunities of conversation with them, which they greatly welcomed. Late at night I left, all the party accompanying me to the station to see me off; and after we had said, “Good-bye,” and they had left, the mother of those children came back quietly and said: —

“Bishop, I felt I must come back just to tell you this. In the winter, after having tried so long to keep my boy and girl English in their ideas, I felt hopeless and gave up the struggle; but I want you to know that in the service to-day I’ve had the strength and courage given me to begin again.”

Is it not worth while to have a travelling chaplain go about and find such experiences as that waiting for him in many places? Can any one possibly think that those who have to live on the Continent of Europe, because of some fanciful ideas of intrusion upon the jurisdiction of another Church, should be deprived of the services of their own, and find, as they inevitably do find, that they are ever accepting for themselves a lowered standard and a dimmer ideal?

I remember a girl whom I had confirmed in Switzerland coming at a later visit to tell me that, after six months of happy life as a communicant, she had begun to “fall away,” and now seemed to have “lost all interest.” What was she to do? On being questioned, it appeared that at the end of those six months she had gone to stay with a family in the country, where there was no English church within any possible distance, and she said: —

“I missed the services at first, but I found gradually that I could do without them; and so I grew not to mind.” I advised her, wherever she was in future, when not able to attend a service, carefully to use the Communion Office at eight o’clock, and think of all those who were in church, and realize her unity with them, and reverently and slowly think over all the special parts of the service, and she would find herself eager enough to go to church at the usual time when opportunity again presented itself, as she would have wished every time she was reading the service that she was having the complete experience. She would not “find that she could do without it.” Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. And if we drop away from those means of grace which help us to be spiritually minded, there will certainly in time be little, if any, spiritual experiences to show.

This chapter is not, like the others, concerned with Russian people and affairs; but I have ventured to write it because without it English Churchmen would not be able to understand fully the influence we are exercising upon Russian life and thought even now, and which, in far fuller measure, we are expecting to exercise in the time to come.

The Duma (I was assured in 1911 when calling at the Ministry of the Interior in Petrograd) have been preparing a Bill for some time to give the Anglican Church in Russia a legal status and recognition such as it has never yet had! We shall be glad and thankful enough to have it, but I am far more happy and grateful in the thought of the real spiritual influence our Church possesses and exercises, even without that legal status, both in the permanent chaplaincies and in those distant places visited from time to time.

Just as in its legislation, it is not so much the law as it stands which determines the state of things social in Russia, as the trend and aim and purpose of every new enactment, and the present actual life of the people. All that is in one direction in Russia. Government becomes ever more and more constitutional. It is the same with respect to religious life and prospects. There has been no change whatever in the actual formal and legal relations of the Russian and Anglican Churches; but surely and evidently, in sympathy, mutual knowledge, regard, and respect, every year, they are drawing more closely and affectionately together.

I cannot close this chapter without expressing my deep and grateful appreciation of the help and support given to our work by the Russia Society. It is no longer a trading company but still possesses large funds and, it seems to me, they must all be spent in support of our Anglican Church in Russia. It is impossible even to think of what that work would be without the help given to us by the Russia Society, and the British Factory in Petrograd.

CHAPTER XI

The Jews

The Jewish question was the first of many I was called upon to consider after crossing the Russian frontier, for my first service within the empire was the Confirmation of a Jew. He was of the educated class, and particularly attractive; and as he bowed low over my hand and kissed it with a singular grace of manner the western part of Europe seemed already far away. It was at Warsaw, where, as at Cracow – the ancient capital of Poland – the Jews form a larger and more influential part of the population than in any other European city. It will surprise many, no doubt, to hear that, though the Anglican Church has no legal status as yet, our chaplain at Warsaw has the sole and exclusive right of baptizing those Jews who are Russian subjects, and wish to be received into the Christian Church. Any Jew who wishes to become a Christian, if in the Russian Empire, must go to Warsaw and receive Baptism from the Anglican chaplain, maintained there for many years by the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.

This young Russian, with his wife, had travelled a great distance for his Baptism and Confirmation, and, if I remember rightly, was leaving Russia in the course of time. He was able, therefore, to receive Confirmation in our own Church, although Russian subjects, if Jewish, on receiving Baptism from us – it is a strange anomaly that we hope will soon cease – are expected to choose whether they will next be received into the communion of the Lutheran, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox Churches. None of these, of course, attract them after receiving instruction and Baptism in our own Church, and, on that account, no doubt, many of them have reverted again to their old religion.

The passport system in Russia is an admirable and comprehensive one, and as soon as a Hebrew Christian abandons his Faith and returns to Judaism, he is required by law to report it at once to the local authority, in order that his passport may be altered; and on his doing so a notice is at once dispatched to our chaplain at Warsaw that a pen is to be drawn through his name in the baptismal register. It was painfully affecting to turn over the pages of that register, and see those ominous-looking lines drawn from top to bottom of various entries. One could not see anything like it anywhere else, I suppose. It carried the mind back to the early days of the Faith, and to that sad class known as the lapsi (“lapsed”); to the lament over Demas, who had forsaken S. Paul and gone back to the world; and to such promises as “I will not blot out his name from the book of life.”

There is much in the work at Warsaw to take one back thus in spirit to the days of the Apostles. One felt it a little at the Confirmation itself, when saying the sentence which accompanies the laying on of hands, first in German for the young Jew, and then in English for the girl who followed him; but most of all on the Sunday evening, when the services of the day in the little chapel were all over, and everything was quiet.

That is the time always given to “inquirers”; and they came one after another, that first Sunday of mine at Warsaw, stealing in, just as Nicodemus came by night and for the same reason, sometimes singly, sometimes husband and wife together, and sometimes a whole family – the children going off to join the chaplain’s children, while the parents came to us. When the room in time was quite full we began by singing a few hymns in German, after which the chaplain prayed for guidance and the sense of God’s presence; and then a most interesting time followed. He took the holy Gospel for the day, every one reading a verse in turn – in German – during which questions were encouraged if the literal meaning of the verse was not clear.

It was a particularly arresting Gospel for those present to consider, as it included our Lord’s words, “If I by the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.” There is no more striking symbol for a Jew than that of the “finger of God,” nor anything more absorbingly interesting than “God’s kingdom”; and I have always thankfully felt that I was fortunate that night. The Chaplain of Warsaw is not one who loses or wastes opportunities, and he did his very best with that one. It was an extraordinarily interesting scene as I watched the faces of that little gathering of men and women gazing with the keenest and most penetrating of expressions upon their teacher; and now and then, as he mentioned psalm or prophecy, taking up their Bibles to find the passage named. Then, satisfied as to its apposite character, they would look up again as eagerly as before. I seemed to be back again in spirit sharing in one of those Apostolic scenes of the New Testament, when one or another “preached Christ unto them,” and they, as at Berea, received the teaching “with readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures whether those things were so.”

Just such little gatherings as that at Warsaw, and in just such places, to which people came stealthily yet expectantly, were addressed by Barnabas and Paul, by Silas and John Mark. One feels now when listening to a chapter from the Acts of the Apostles, or reading it, as if one had been there and seen and heard. It is only a year since I was once more at Warsaw, and again it was Sunday evening, with the Holy Communion, Confirmation, and other services of the day all over, and just as before the Jewish inquirers came quietly in, in ones and twos and threes, only this time the gathering was larger and the attention keener even than it had been three years before. The same order was followed, the singing of hymns in German, prayer – those present were encouraged to pray in very simple words – the reading of a passage from the New Testament, and then its exposition; but though it was the same faithful teaching of the Faith, or preaching Christ, there was a difference both in what was said and in the questions asked. It was no longer the Messiah, or the Christ fulfilling Messianic psalm or evangelical prophecy, but the living Christ of to-day.

It was a sight not soon, if ever, to be forgotten, those keen Jewish faces, such as our Lord Himself looked into daily during His ministry, eager, expectant, hopeful, while questioning again, as in the Synagogue of Capernaum, how it could be possible for Him to be not only Way and Truth, but Life; how He could in any comprehensible sense be said to live in His people, and how any one could with any conviction say or sing “And now I live in Him.” It made one feel that even there, in far-away and comparatively unknown Russia, that same Spirit is moving upon the waters to whom the Quarterly Review gave its testimony in the October number of 1912, when it stated at the close of a remarkable review of modern German and other critical literature that the net result of modern negative criticism had only been “to make the living Christ a greater Reality to-day than He has been since the days of the Apostles.” So it was at Warsaw that night. They wanted to understand the Christ whom S. Paul not only taught but had experienced ever since his conversion, and which enabled and impelled him to say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

The Jews have had hard experiences in Russia, and the story of their wrongs would take long to tell; but let us hope that now there is no reason for wishing to tell it. We are hoping that in more ways than one Russia is going to “forget those things which are behind, and reach forward to those things which are before,” and which are worthy of the aims of a great nation. Few nobler things have been said during the war than General Botha’s counsel to his fellow-countrymen when the Beyers and De Wet revolution had come to a fitting end. He reminded them that what had happened was within their own household, and their own affair, and that the only right course was to let by-gones be by-gones, and “cultivate a spirit of tolerance and forbearance and merciful oblivion” with respect to the errors of the past.

A year ago, if writing upon Russian life of to-day, one could not but have touched upon the hardships of the Jews who have to live “within the pale” in Russia, and have been alternately tolerated and persecuted, even massacred within recent years; and one would have had to own that there was something to be said upon the Russian side as well, even if not agreeing with it. But this is now no longer necessary. In Russia as in South Africa we must say, “Let by-gones be by-gones, and let the spirit of tolerance and forbearance and merciful oblivion” blot out the errors of the past for Russian and for Jew. It should be remembered also that the devout Jew is as mystical in his religion as the Russian, who must surely now and then, as he looks toward the seven-branched candlestick within his own sacrarium, or listens to the psalms, be reminded that his devotion has a Jewish source.

A Jewish Confirmation with none but Jews in the congregation is a great experience. Twice I have had it at Wandsbeck, just outside Hamburg, where, under Pastor Dolman of our London Society, the work is entirely for and amongst Jews. At my first visit there were about fourteen candidates, fine young men from many countries, one or two being German and Austrian, and several in uniform. As we entered, the large congregation, without rising, began to sing a German hymn, slowly and softly, and at once the whole atmosphere of the place became deeply devotional. Everything was in German, and though I confirm in German I cannot venture to preach or address in the language; and so in the address Pastor Dolman stood beside me to interpret, and so masterly and rapid was this interpretation that the candidates seemed to be listening to me, rather than to him, from first to last. There was no mistaking the spirit of that congregation, nor the character of the service. Every one was in it, every one deeply interested and attentive, and eager to be spiritually helped. The consciousness of it seemed to embrace every one present in the most convincing way, and again seemed to carry us back to Apostolic days, making one wonder whether amongst those rugged and strong-featured men and women there might not be another Aquila and Priscilla, ready for work if God should bring it to them; whether amongst those youths there might not be another Timotheus ready to gladden the heart of any one who should see what was in him and take him in hand for God. “Why shouldn’t there be amongst this eager-looking crowd,” I found myself thinking, “another Apollos, or even a S. Paul?”

I shall always be glad also to have visited Cracow, and taken a service there in what we shall probably soon be speaking of as “the old days before the war.” Nowhere, I suppose, in Europe does the Jew walk the streets of a city with the same confidence and assurance as he does in this ancient capital of Poland and burial-place of its kings. The Jews form a very large part of its population, fill the foremost places of commercial importance, and show most unmistakably in every look and gesture how strong, whenever it can find expression, is the Jewish pride of race.

There is a very small Christian community both here and at Lemberg – or Luow as we must call it now – but there are two licensed laymen to deal with Jewish inquirers, and we had a celebration of Holy Communion, and conference together two years ago. I saw then another side of the Russian or Polish Jew, for whether he is in Poland proper or that part of the old kingdom which is called Galicia, or in the western part of Russia – he is not legally allowed anywhere else in the empire – the Jew, of course, is always essentially the same.

It is most important to keep this from slipping out of sight when thinking of them. I was reading a short time ago a most depressing account of life in some Jewish villages in a certain part of Russia, of the dirt and degradation of the people there, their cunning and greed, their hang-dog expression of countenance, and disgusting clothing. Every one is familiar with the stories told of the usurer and the extortioner who suck the blood of their inexperienced and unsuspecting victims, and it is not for me to question their accuracy. We may all admit that Shylock is a type. But still environment plays its part, and it would be difficult to picture any other result from the treatment which has been meted out to Jews in Russia than the degradation which has followed.

A very different picture, however, is given for us by Mr. Rothay Reynolds, in the report of a Russian official, sent out by his government to visit the settlements of Russian Jews in the Argentine Republic. He made a formal report, but it was no dry and formal statement, but a real picture, painted in glowing colours, of the “change wrought in them by the free and open life of the new land,” and he described with enthusiasm the rich farms possessed and admirably cultivated by the former children of the ghetto. He drew a contrast between the peaky, timorous Jewish boys of the Russian pale and the lusty Jewish youngsters astride half-tamed horses on the ranche. And the settlers spoke of Russia as our colonists speak of the old country, as “home.” No Jew in Russia dreams of calling himself a Russian, but when he goes and settles in another land far away, and prospers there, then he can speak of Russia as “home.”

There are 6,000,000 Jews in the empire, and 250,000 of them rallied to the colours, we are told, at the general mobilization. It may be claimed, therefore, that they have “done their bit.” Will this count for nothing after the war? We are assured by one authority after another that the war only precipitated the proclamation of autonomy for Poland, and gave it wider application and comprehension. We are told, and I for one believe it, that the government have been preparing for some time to give constitutional rule to Finland as well as to Poland, and that the old idea of “Russifaction” is entirely abandoned and set aside. All this is in keeping with what has followed, in some cases swiftly, in others slowly, but in all important matters which concern the well-being of the state, in some measure or other, since 1905. This being so we should expect that the Jews will also be admitted before long to equal civil and political rights with other Russian subjects of the Emperor, and I feel sure the hopes will not be disappointed. The Jewish revolutionaries in the past have been the most dangerous of all, and I believe there has never been any conspiracy of real moment in which they have not taken a share; but there again, as we think of their degradation in country villages, we cannot but ask, “How could anything else be expected of them? Treated as they have been, their boldest spirits would be sure to plot.” The Jews with us are loyal and patriotic citizens and though proud – as they have a right to be – of their race, they are proud also of their nationality. So it will be in Russia when she gives them freedom. None will be more patriotic than they, amongst all the mixed races which make up the empire. They have given a foretaste of this already. A writer in the Contemporary Review last December (Gabriel Costa), in telling us something of what “Freeing Six Millions” would mean, points out that while no Russian Jewish soldier could hold commissioned rank, nor aspire even to be the conductor of a military band – though none could be more fitted – nor be accepted as an army surgeon, yet when the call to arms came great numbers of Jewish doctors were summoned to the front, and obeyed the call. He also tells us how Jews of all social grades contributed freely to the Red Cross funds, whilst – most wonderful of all – the Jews of Kishineff, where one of the most terrible of all Russia’s “pogroms” or massacres (the word means literally destruction) took place, offered up prayers in its synagogues for the success of the Russian army.

It is a very significant and instructive fact of life that where great issues have to be faced together, whether it is by few or many, those barriers which have been considered fundamental, of race, religion, and politics, have a strange way of disappearing and sinking out of sight. Sometimes it is disconcerting, but often it is most encouraging and even inspiring. And so when Jews are confronted by the tremendous issues of this war they find that they can pray for those towards whom but lately they have been burning with a deep sense of indignant wrong. Russians and Poles have been at enmity together for generations now, but in face of the common peril and the common foe all this is forgotten, and the Russian officers sent to head-quarters soon after the invasion of Poland their grateful recognition of the heroism of the Polish peasant children who made a regular practice of carrying water to the Russian trenches, often under fire and at imminent peril of their lives, while steadfastly refusing all payment. So with Jew and Christian. The death of the Chief Rabbi of Lyons on the battle-field has been told in papers all over the world since it first appeared, last October, in the Jewish World. “The Chief Rabbi was bringing spiritual consolation to the wounded Jewish soldiers on the battle-field, when he was called to the side of a dying Roman Catholic trooper. The dying man, evidently mistaking the rabbi for a priest of his own faith, begged him to hold the crucifix before his eyes and to give him his blessing. While holding a crucifix and whispering words of comfort to the mortally wounded soldier the rabbi was shot dead!” No less appealing and encouraging for those who long to see nationalities and great races appreciating and admiring each other’s national temperaments and racial characteristics are some of the incidents which Gabriel Costa gives us in his Freeing Six Millions.