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106 Spring Scenes in Samara.
107
peasantry struggling against starvation and pestilence; the
rich continue in luxury and idleness, the Government is
exacting the last mite from the oppressed people for
the instruments of international murder; the preachers
of religion proclaim submission and self-denial, with
reward in the next world, while they themselves live in
affluence and grab all of this world’s wealth they can, and
while preaching the Gospel of the Cross hunt down the
" heretics" as wild beasts. The miserable peasants have
cried to heaven that their children may be delivered from
starvation, but the brazen gates have remained closed. They
write letters, piteous in their very illegibility, to authorities
asking for justice, and receive no reply, or are punished for
their audacity in complaining; they knock at doors that will
not open to them, they speak to persons who will not listen.
They understand nothing of the system of official society,
with its forms, its laws, its etiquette.
On my table is a pamphlet containing two sermons by a
German pastor on " The Famine and Our Sins." Whose sins?
Why does the punishment fall on the innocent? Are these
peasants’ sinners above all others that they should suffer and
the oppressors go free? What have those poor orphan children
done that they should wander by thousands over the steppes,
starving and freezing to death, or surviving only to lead a
life of misery and degradation ? What is their sin to merit
so great a "punishment" ?
" Faithless pessimism," you exclaim, in your comfortable
homes. Maybe so, but these were my thoughts at the time,
however I may look at things when the deep stirrings of
emotion have passed by. But would it not be well to consider,
not so much the frame of mind into which these sufferings and
cruelties threw me, but the facts themselves? Optimism is a
grand thing, if you have first faced the terrible suffering
and evil in the world; faith is magnificent if, while
comprehending the depths of woe and sin, you yet can put
unwavering trust in God. But the optimism that is based on
wilful ignoring of ugly facts is either callousness or
cowardice, and the " faith " that is exerted for other people
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