“But is it not dangerous?” I said. “Surely you come into conflict with the authorities.”
“Not much now. Three of us were hanged two years ago. And often meetings are forbidden. The last Governor forbade our meetings altogether; that was ten years ago. Many of us suffered through that; some are in prison now and some died in prison. But we held our meetings despite the ukase of the Governor. We used to gather together at a friend’s house, and then after tea we would have our few hymns and a prayer or two. These meetings were generally very happy, the common bond of danger made us closer than brothers.”
“And you?” I asked. “Were you ever arrested?”
“Yes, with four others one night; two of them died in prison, they were old men and it was hard on them. I served five years’ penal servitude. That was for holding a meeting against the order.”
The minister was silent as if recalling old memories, and then suddenly he went on as if brushing aside his thoughts. “But things are quieter now. In all Russia there are twenty thousand Baptists alone, besides many thousand other Protestants, and we are added to in numbers every year. In Rostof a little congregation has become three thousand since the Duma came in. And now dotted all over the country we have little missions among the peasants; it’s the peasants who’re coming to us, and nobody else has been able to teach them. Every year new missions start. Next month I make my little country tour, when the harvesters are in the fields, and I go to five new places—five places to which the Gospel has come this year.”
On the very first Sunday morning comes my host to warn me not to be late for service. I prepared to go to chapel seriously; it was long since I had been in any place of worship other than a temple of the Orthodox Church.
Half a mile distant I found the building, the little defiant, heterodox place so brave in its denial and protest. Here was no church, not even a chapel, just a plain wooden building. This black, gaunt building, less beautiful and less ornamented than a house. God dwells in those jewelled, perfumed caskets of the Orthodox Church; He dwells here also. How well and how daringly the paradox had been asserted! And they called it a meeting, not a service, and it was held upstairs and not down; and instead of standing all through one sat all through, and there were no crosses and no ornaments and no collections, and the women sat on one side while the men sat on the other.
The room was large. Wooden forms ranged on each side, there was a narrow passage down the middle, and at the head of it stood the preacher’s platform, slightly elevated from the people. The whole looked somewhat like a chapel schoolroom.
The congregation was in its way quite a grand one. Not that it was by any means numerous; the little place was full, one couldn’t say more than that. But there wasn’t a woman dressed in anything finer than printed cotton, and the minister was the only man who wore a collar. Something in the people called out one’s reverence. Each woman had a cotton shawl for head-dress, and as the women’s side filled one looked along a vista of shawled heads, and when now and then one of them turned to look at a stranger one saw the broad-browed, pale face of a peasant woman.
They were all peasant folk, or working men or artisans, and very simple and earnest. One knew much of them when one heard the words of their elected pastor. Ivan Savelev, when he came in, walked directly to his place and knelt, and then after a few minutes’ silence closed his prayer by a few words spoken on behalf of the congregation—gentle, simple words, such as a mother might put into the mouth of her child. He is a tall, douce man, the minister, of a Scottish type of countenance. His calm face and eyes suggest an infinite reserve of wisdom, and his gentle, musical voice tells of a mind and will in harmony. Presently he read from the Bible, and then gave out a hymn, and afterwards spoke from a text, first to the women, then to the men, and then to both collectively, and then gave out another hymn. What struck me was that he did each thing as if it were worth while, so that the numbers of the hymns sounded beautifully.