The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow

by Edward Alfred Steiner

Here was a Slovak who spoke English almost perfectly, who wrote his native language classically, who clung to a noble faith passionately; yet that which bound us to him closely and I must regretfully admit, most closely, was the fact that Jan Chorvat was what he was, because of certain religious influences emanating from America. These influences and ideals, which are slowly growing stronger, are being augmented and reënforced by returning immigrants who come home with a passion for their kinsmen, eager to redeem them from their individual and national sins.

The centre of this religious movement is in O Tura, one of those mountain villages isolated, but brought into the world’s current by mighty ideals; fit birthplace of a new hope.

Here a Protestant pastor ministered in the more or less stereotyped forms of the established faith, and, when he died, left three daughters, the “Roy Sisters,” to carry on his work for the people he loved. Hampered by a strict orthodoxy and a suspicious government, they hungered with their people and for them, unconscious of a larger faith and a better way; until so commonplace a thing as a religious newspaper, published by the missionaries of the American Board at Prague, found its way to them.

Our credulity has been so severely tested by the narratives of missionaries who hinged mighty consequences upon trivial causes, that here too one is assailed by doubt; until one reads Christina Roy’s little story: “How I came to the Light.”

In simple yet graphic language, she tells of her life in the parsonage, her father’s struggle against adverse conditions, her own budding ideals, and finally the important moment when for the first time she came in touch with the vital truths of Christianity as presented in the little Bohemian newspaper, Bethania. Upon so slender a thread travelled this mighty current which gave direction to her own life, which has enabled her to enlarge the vision of an oppressed peasantry, and which is now encouraging her and the noble group of men and women around her to attempt the almost hopeless struggle against intemperance.

Whether one agrees with the type of theology which these people preach or not, one can but feel that they are in touch with real spiritual forces, and that, by the test of character and of work accomplished, we who travel faster in the paths of what we call progress, are compelled to halt and admire.

The students who were the members of my expedition were nearly all recent college graduates and had left their schools with much of their traditional faith unsettled. Any doubts they may have had regarding the doctrine of the Incarnation, as it is commonly interpreted, were lost, when they saw the spirit of Jesus dominating the lives of simple peasants whose dull faces have become radiant, whose animal appetites have been controlled, and whose homes have become the abodes of peace and happiness.

To look into the faces of the “Roy Sisters,” of Jan Chorvat and his wife, and of hundreds of peasants who come to hear the Gospel preached in true simplicity, was a better definition of the doctrine of the Incarnation than any professor of theology can give.

The Atonement, as defined by our orthodox churches and which is such a stumbling-block to the rationalistic mind, lost all its mystery in watching another member of this group, John Rohacěk, at work among the gypsies; loving those whom no one loves, living with them in huts by the wayside and trying with a divine passion to lift them out of age-long Paganism into a wholesome relation to the doctrine: “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”

Although John Rohacěk believes with all his simple soul that “Jesus paid it all,” he is willing and eager to shed his blood for God’s despised children, those most neglected of all, the gypsies. For them he has suffered persecution, imprisonment, hunger and thirst, in the true apostolic spirit; and although those American students may never be able to explain to themselves the meaning of the Atonement, they certainly will never be able to say that they have not seen the Atonement “at work.”