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Rev. Charles A. Blanchard 105
to have been people coming over the border with the privilege of
taking their religion with them for themselves, but not of giving it to
any of the peasants around them. Some one says that men are driven
to God either from a sense of guilt or from a sense of need. Now there
is no question that a sense of need was very great among these mil-
lions of people in Russia; living in little earthen floored homes, feed-
ing on black bread, drinking water or a little goat’s milk, or whatever
they could get, and getting along in the best way they could,—this
was their habit of life. And that sort of experience naturally drives
a man to reach out after some one that will sympathize with him and
help him. And when these peasant populations in southern Russia
found that there were people that had talked about another kind of
religion that had some light in it and some hope in it, they were at-
tracted to it. Their meetings were held in little homes at midnight,
out in the depths of the forests; they were continually under police
supervision. Often times at midnight the husband would be dragged
away. Perhaps the wife, broken-hearted, would undertake to follow
her husband, walking six hundred or a thousand miles sometimes, as
best she could. This was the way the work went on in South Russia.
But in spite of the fines and in spite of the imprisonments, in spite
of the flogging benches, in spite of death, this religion of the Lord
Jesus Christ did make progress in Russia. And now, I suppose for
fifty or a hundred years, this evangelistic propaganda, limited in so
many ways and so extremely hidden from the world, has been going
forward. What is the relation of this past to the present? I am not
prepared to tell you because I am not a prophet, and I do not know
things that God has kept in His own power; but it is my conviction
that the present revolution in Russia, the banishment of the Czar, and
the proclamation of religious liberty throughout the whole empire,
have resulted from the hidden labors of these teachers in the north,
and these peasant peoples in the south and central portions of the
empire. As I said, I cannot prove this. Did the evangelization which
has been carried on in these hidden ways, with terror of life, result
in the present political and religious upheaval in Russia? Personally,
I have no doubt that it did. No power but Christianity has ever made
a people battle successfully for liberty. Men must know the truth, or
they never can be tree.
America’s Debt to Russia
The question now before this conference is. What ought a people
like the American people to do for a people like the Russian people?
What ought a people favored as we have been to do for a people so
unfavored as the Russian people have been? Most of us have never
suffered for our faith very much. Here we are, a great nation of 110
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