The people sang with a will and kept in tune. The pastor, after giving out the number, stepped over to the harmonium and played a tune. He is choir-master as well as preacher, and teaches his people new tunes from two books of his own—Hymns, Ancient and Modern, and an old copy of Moody and Sankey; priceless treasures, one would say, though the printed English words remain inscrutable. We went off to the tune of “See the conquering hero comes,” the Russian words seeming very irrelevant. When the tune was in full swing one really felt oneself back in England—old memories crowded to my mind. Just before the sermon there was another hymn, and this to the tune of “Oh, God, our help in ages past;” but a presto motif, and a quaint alteration in the phrasing of the tune, reminded one of peals of church bells. They sang it as if the lines ran:
“Oh, God, our help in ages past our
Hope for years to come.
Our Shelter from the stormy blast and
Our Eternal home.”
The pastor’s sermon was direct; to him the issue was clear. Not alone those who say “Gospody, Gospody,” but those who do the will of my Father shall enter into the Kingdom. He counselled them to lead earnest, sober lives, and to bring up their families in the truth. Everyone listened in resolute stillness. One felt their God in the midst of them—the God of the Puritans.
I found my thoughts straying back to England, and I wondered if I saw before me a picture of what the early Independents or early Methodists were like. I was accustomed to chapels in London where each person belongs to our advanced civilisation, and where the preacher hands more than the simple bread of life. Here each man was of the crude, rough material out of which civilisations are made. Here was a passion for simplicity; everything was elemental, original. There were strange, new silences to be divined below the voices and the sounds, strange barenesses and nakednesses underneath the scanty nature of the service. For a moment one shut one’s eyes to the room, and opened other eyes to another scene—to the stable and the manger and the straw. Yes, here were the beginnings of things.
After service I walked home with the pastor. “You will become a political force,” I said. “Who knows?” he replied. “I hope not, but we increase in numbers. Everyone added to us is one added to the forces of truth and purity.”
Some pilgrims passed us. “There they go,” he said, “hundred of miles to pray to God in an ancient monastery. God is there, He is not here, so they say. They go to pray, and they waste their money and their time, and it all ends in vodka drinking. God grant they may become less and less.”
The pilgrims retreated, staff in hand, hooded and with great bundles on their backs. Slowly, as it were, reluctantly, they moved away, and to me they seemed the living figure of the past, and this fresh, strong man beside me was the new.