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8 travelling. In his own province, in all large centres of population, he had already established fairly-organised communities—places like Elisabethgrad, Odessa, Nicolaieff, and Kherson, and had engaged the powerful support of selected men as presbyters of groups of villages. Vitriashenko was one of the most energetic of these; other able men of this province, who afterwards occupied prominent positions in the progress and development of Stundism, were Zimbal, Gerasim Balaban, Strigoun, Ivanoff, and last, but not least, Ryaboshapka. These men, and many others, kept in constant touch with the German colonists, and were the means of enlisting the active co-operation of several pious Germans—men who added the necessary Teutonic method and balance to the onward march of the impetuous Little Russians. By degrees, villages in the provinces contiguous to Kherson were visited. The Stundist leaders respected no geographical limits. They and their emissaries travelled into Bessarabia, the Crimea, Ekaterinoslav and Kief, and wherever they went they met with the most extraordinary success. They were received with open arms and with open hearts. Despoiled and emptied of all spiritual life by the perfunctory and often scandalous ministrations of the Orthodox clergy, and hungering after a higher and a fuller life, the simple Russian peasants felt that in the new Evangel, now for the first time heard by them, there was healing, and comfort, and repletion. The gathering communities of Stundists bubbled over with zeal and enthusiasm, and wherever a man was found among them who had any gift of speech, he was giving all his spare time to telling to others, near and at a distance, the wonderful tidings that had brought peace to his own soul.

The emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 gave a wonderful impetus to the movement we are considering. Prior to the proclamation of this beneficent enactment the