Russian Life To-day

by Bp. Herbert Bury

The four evangelists always appear painted upon the Royal Gates, together with a representation of the Annunciation, our Lord, and the Holy Virgin, on either side. This is never departed from. In every church which follows traditional lines there are the four huge pillars holding up the whole structure—typifying the four evangelists again. Upon the roof they are set forth in the four cupolas, which are always there at the corners, while a fifth rising above them typifies our Lord over and above and dominating, yet supported by, them. Then there is nothing in the ordinary services to compare with the reading of the Holy Gospel to the people, nor is any special or private ministration complete without reading some portion of these, the most important parts of the sacred Scriptures.

It is easy to see, therefore, how it comes about that the Russian sense of the living Christ is essentially that which is realized by His Apostles and described in the New Testament.

Last year no less than three writers, as different from each other as they could well be, writing of visits paid to the Holy Land—Mr. Robert Hichens, the novelist, in The Holy Land, Sir Frederick Treves, the well-known and eminent surgeon, in The Land that is Desolate, and Mr. Stephen Graham, in With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem—all alike show us that no one had made the same impression upon them as the Russians who had come to realize their Lord in the very place where He had lived our human life. They all so clearly felt that those simple-minded folk, as they followed traditions and visited one place after another from Bethlehem to Calvary, and wept where He had wept, and prayed where He had prayed, looked over the places and the waters upon which His eyes had rested, crossed themselves reverently again and again where He had suffered, and sung Te Deum and Alleluia where He had risen, were looking not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, believing with all the strength of their great and simple hearts that “the things which are seen are temporal, while the things which are not seen are eternal.”

To the devout Russian the so-called good things of this life are unsubstantial and swiftly passing experiences, while the great and only realities worth thinking about seriously are those spiritual experiences of the Apostles as they went in and out with Christ and companied with Him, which are now described in the Gospels that we may have the same “even to the end of the ages.” If Russia gives, as we pray she may, a lead to Christendom in the direction of unity, she will have a wonderfully uplifting and apostolic contribution to offer to the common stock of our Christian heritage.

And yet with all this wealth of very real spiritual experience there goes also a sad deficiency of moral conduct. “But that vitiates it all,” some of my readers may exclaim. No; it does not. We, with our very different temperament, have come to substitute morality for religion and the ethical for the spiritual, whereas for the “whole man,” as even Ecclesiastes tells us, both are necessary. Morality is not religion at all while the spiritual faculties are absolutely quiescent and the soul knows no need of God nor cries out for Him. A deep sense of the spiritual and a longing and effort to attain touch with the eternal is religion, although an imperfect morality impairs and cripples the adequate witness, the full unfettered enjoyment of it. And, as another writer has lately done in the political sphere, I would plead for the Russians that “they did not get a fair start.”

I have already described the rough-and-ready way in which they were converted to Christianity, never having anything like our opportunities of instruction from the first. I have never heard a Russian sermon! The vast majority of the clergy have never been trained to preach, and would not be able to do so if they tried. The people are not taught at all in church, except by what is read to them in Scripture, or what they read for themselves. Let Englishmen give them “fair play” all round, both in political and constitutional, and also in moral deficiencies; and let us remember that it was to a body of real and earnest Christians—“saints” and “faithful,” he himself calls them—that S. Paul found it necessary to write and caution against “the lusts of the flesh, foolish talking and unseemly jesting, covetousness and uncleanness, lying and stealing.” If it was necessary to write those fifth and sixth chapters of the Ephesians to a body of Christian believers of whose sincerity an Apostle had no doubt, we may well have hopeful patience with a great body of our fellow Christians whose want of consistency in conduct provokes such ready criticism. It is well known how a mystical people like the West Indians (I have described it at length in a former book, A Bishop among Bananas, in chap. v) resent being accused of theft when helping themselves to “God’s gifts,” as they call them, in the shape of fruit and fowls, when they would not dream of taking money, clothing, or other material things, or would consider themselves thieves if they did. And so it interested me to learn the other day that the Russian peasant views thefts of the same kind of things in much the same way, drawing in his mind a distinction between that which God gives for all and that which man produces for himself. It is imperfect reasoning, we know, as there is no real distinction between what a man produces by cultivation and what he manufactures; but we can understand an untrained and rather childlike mind making such a distinction.

The devout Russian peasantry in this stage often seem to illustrate our Lord’s words concerning things revealed to “babes” which even the “wise and prudent” seem to miss. Sir Donald M. Wallace again tells the story in Our Russian Ally which he told in his Russia—it will bear constant repetition—as an instance of real spiritual insight in a simple and untrained mind. “I remember once asking a common labourer,” he says, “what he thought of the Mussulman Tartars among whom he happened to be living; and his reply, given with evident sincerity, was—‘Not a bad sort of people.’ ‘And what about their religion?’ I inquired. ‘Not at all a bad sort of faith—you see they received it like the colour of their skins, from God.’” He assumed, of course, in his simple piety, that whatever comes from God must be good. It necessitated a very special spiritual experience and real vision before a Christian Apostle could say the same thing, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons”; but that common labourer in this little incident had taken in the same wide outlook, in a perfectly normal way, from his ordinary surroundings and the religious influences which make up such an important portion of his life.

The lesson is learnt early. I was, one morning, in an elementary school in Siberia, just before the work of the day began, to speak to the children. They opened with prayer, but how different from prayers in our own schools! The master and teachers did nothing except pray with the rest. At a sign that all was ready a boy of twelve stepped out and took his place before the ikon in its corner, and then bowing with that inimitable grace which belongs alone to the Russian when at prayer, and making the sign of the Cross, he gravely led the simple prayers of the whole school, all singing softly and reverently in unison. It was all inexpressibly touching and appealing, and to be treasured up with those other things of which one says, “I shall never forget.”

The sign of the Cross is always made very slowly and solemnly, quite differently from other Churches, and from right to left upon the breast, and it is always accompanied by a slow and reverent bowing of the head, and is repeated usually three times. It is the special sign during the public services that a worshipper is just then feeling his or her own part in it. People do not use this devotion at set times during service, but just when they wish, and as the spirit moves them. I have been in the S. Isaac’s choir when all the men and boys were singing a hymn, and suddenly a man near me would stop, bow, and cross himself devoutly, and then resume his hymn. No one would take the least notice, but all would go on singing as before. Then a choir-boy, after a moment or two, would do the same, his companions continuing to sing till their turn of being moved within came also. I have seen soldiers in the ranks do just the same when bareheaded at an outdoor service. There is so much spontaneity and elasticity and liberty in Russian worship. They do just as they feel “led by the Spirit” to do.