Page:Stundists.pdf/14

2 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