“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.”
The British Community at Atbazar, Siberia, after Morning Service during the Bishop’s Visit.
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.