Page:Stundists.pdf/9

 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