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WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO EVANGELIZE
RUSSIA?
By REV. CHARLES A. BLANCHARD, D. D.
I
WISH to say one or two things suggested by the remarks of my
Brother Neprash, who preceded me, and the first is this: He said
that Russia was extremely religious. Now that is true of every
country in the world in which there is a false religion. That is true
of all Roman Catholic countries, and of all pagan countries; they are
extremely religious. And we shall never understand the situation of
the world until we learn that the most terrible foe of Christianity is
religion. When you send a Christian missionary to Japan or to India,
to Russia or to Poland, or anywhere else, those who will oppose him
the most bitterly are the masters of the religion of the nation. That
has always been so.
I desire to remark, in the second place, that ritualism is as possible
to Protestants as it is to Catholics. It is quite as possible for Protes-
tants, Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians and Lutherans, or
any other people to get to be mere ritualists as it is for Romanists, or
Greeks. And when you find a Protestant who is a mere ritualist, you
will find that he is in exactly the same condition spiritually as the
Roman Catholic, or the Greek Catholic, who is a mere ritualist. Get
enough of them together and you will have the same civilization under
Protestanism that you would have under Catholicism. Now we should
remember that, because we are all in danger of becoming ritualists, we
are all in danger of going through certain forms and thinking that we
are all right because we do go through them, though there is no salva-
tion except in Christ.
The third suggestion is this: You will remember our brother said
that there were a great many of these sects in Russia, and he mentioned
a number of them. I was just asking him whether these sects were
open seceders from the Greek Church or not, and he said that out-
wardly they conformed, and I suppose that that is true. So we must
still think of the Greek Church as the Church of the Russian people;
a fact which I think is changing very rapidly, and which I hope is to
change much more rapidly, and which I hope is to be changed in large
measure by the results of our meeting here; but a fact still,—the
religion of the Russian people is the Greek Catholic. I have only one
thing more of this general sort to say, and that is that as Luther and
Fenelon and Madam Guyon and Thomas a Kempis and Saint Francis of
Assist became humble Christians while in the Roman Catholic Church,
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