CHAPTER XI. RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL IDEAS—II. CHAPTER XI. RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL IDEAS—II. "wE discussed in our last chapter the attitude of the Stundists towards the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, pointing out that Stundism was peculiarly a New Testament religion, purely Evangelical in its character, but with many unimportant divergences from the accepted standards of Evangelicism as they are held in this country. We next showed how the hostile attitude of the Protestants towards some of the most dearly-cherished notions of their Orthodox fellow-countrymen, for instance, towards icon worship and the office of the priest, did more to make them detested than any mere assertion of the positive side of their creed. It will help to explain the position of the Stundists if we proceed to give a few more examples of the corrupt and useless institutions of Church and State against which they never cease to lift up their voices. Any one who knows anything about Russia knows about the 103 prazdniki or holidays of the ecclesiastical year. Most of them are saints' days, or the birthdays of Imperial personages, and they are distinguished throughout the entire empire as days on which a man may get drunk with impunity, and when work is to be carefully avoided. These are the days when the gala performances are given at theatre and café chantant, when the kabaki and brothels are fullest, when the drunken lout has a sort of special licence to lie about the street unmolested by the police. Morally and religiously these holidays are a farce, notwithstanding the magnificent services in the churches which begin them ; from the industrial point of view they are, of course, ruinous. The Stundist will have none of them, and perhaps somewhat too ostentatiously drives out his team of oxen to plough on the day consecrated to John the Baptist or Mary Magdalene. The Russian, naturally lazy, with a natural tendency, moreover, to debauch, longs for a prazdnik to come round; and when he sees a set of men rise up and denounce what is to him the bright spot in existence, he has no tolerance for such men, and the worst names in his vocabulary of abuse are flung at them. Vodka drinking is another of the terrible national evils under which Russia groans, and against which the Stundist has sternly set his face. The old Raskolniki who defended drinking and denounced smoking on the ground that it was not that which entered into the man that defiled him, but that which cometh out, have raised many a laugh at their ingenious perversion of Scripture. The Stundist, however, raises no laugh, his views are not to be trifled with. In his opposition to vodka and tobacco he takes the highest religious and moral grounds, and fiercely denounces the miserable mujiki, who are slaves to drink, as well as the system of government or administration which makes the shame of the people one of the surest and largest sources of the Imperial revenue. The Stundist is a thinking, enlightened man, with clear notions about questions that are at present agitating the world. In this respect he is as different as possible to his Orthodox neighbour, who is generally a bovine-minded man, with brutal instincts and little outlook beyond to-day. The Stundist reads everything he can lay his hands on—old newspapers and magazines, books on agriculture, cookery books, books of household medicine; and he has formed fairly distinct notions on most things he reads about. If you visit a village where Orthodox and Stundists live together, you can nearly always pick out the Stundist. He is cleaner, brighter, more alert. His clothes look smarter, his hair is cut shorter, his beard is trimmed or shaven. And if you enter their houses the difference is still more marked. Cleanliness and neatness in place of dirt and disorder. The children are tidy, the housewife does not shrink away in terrified bashfulness, but greets you with ease, and as though she had equal rights in the house with her husband. The food is placed before you in vessels, not tumbled out on the table ; you have spoons and knives given you, and many another comfort is in store for you. In a word, the Stundist is on a higher plane of civilisation than his Orthodox neighbour. This, of course, is quite sufficient to condemn him. His trimmed beard and square-cut jacket are traced to German influences, and the fact that he keeps his children tidy and his cottage clean is only another proof that he is unpatriotically leaving the ways of his ancestors to follow after the manners and customs of the enemy of his fatherland. The position of women and children in a Stundist household is worthy of attention. To a very great extent the patriarchal form of family government still prevails in Russia. It is hardly too much to say that the head of the household rules absolutely and autocratically, or that he possesses the power of inflicting death on child or wife who is disobedient or unfaithful. The children stand around in fear and trembling in the presence of their father, the wife rises on his entrance, is seated only when he permits it, and her portion at meals is what he leaves or refuses. The Stundist has altered all this. His wife is his helpmate and bosom friend, with share in his joy and trouble. She is his sister in the assembly for worship. Her voice may be heard there in praise or prayer. She sits down with him at the same Lord's Table, and, with equal rights acknowledged before God, the Stundist husband would never think of curtailing her rights or slighting her position in his own household. It rarely happens that a Stundist inflicts corporal punishment on his children. The law of love is the law of his home. The Stundist does not go to the New Testament for his theology alone. He finds there a system of morals, and a series of distinct precepts for regulating the social duties of individuals and of States. Christ's precepts were uttered and enjoined because they were in Christ's opinion capable of fulfilment, and those best suited to the needs of the world; and they are not to be rejected simply because of some fancied difference between our time and the time of the disciples. If our environment, and traditions, and system of education, and method of government unfit us for carrying out Christ's behests to the letter, it is a proof, not that Christ was impracticable, or too ideal, but that our systems and environments want readjustment or total abolition. The military system, according to the Stundists, is nothing else than the recognition of brute force as the final arbiter in human affairs. A soldier is a hired assassin, no matter how you may gild over his horrible occupation by calling it patriotic, or by calling in the priest to consecrate his bloody battle-flags. The bureaucratic system, like militarism, takes multitudes of men away from useful labour, and places them in positions of authority that no man should fill who is not wholly pure, patient, and incorruptible. "We know what the tchinovniki are," wrote a Stundist once to us; "there is hardly one of them, especially of those with whom we come in contact, who is not thoroughly corrupt, and open to the pettiest bribe. We will not bribe them; their occupation is a detestable one, in which no honest man should engage." Holding such views about the officials, is it any wonder that the Stundists receive small mercy at their hands? The New Testament, moreover, regulates the political economy of the Stundists. Usury, profit, interest, wages, rent—if in practice the Stundist cannot separate himself from these symptoms of a corrupt economic state of affairs, he believes that the community at large is injured by accepting them as in the nature of things, and as indispensable to the carrying on of commercial intercourse. "The Lord gives His people the earth and its fulness," lately wrote a Stundist leader ; "we are all equal in His sight, and the fulness of the earth is as much mine as yours, as much yours as mine. If you take for yourself alone what is intended for all, you commit a sin against your fellows, and seek to frustrate the purposes of God." And again, "If I, seeing my brother in extremity, come to him with my abundance, and give freely, and if he does the same for me when I need it we fulfil the law of Christ; but if in his necessity I say that I will only lend him something, and bind him down to repay me that, and more that I have not lent, I wrong my brother, and take a mean advantage of his weakness."