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- Forty Years in Russia. The Rev. N. F. Hoijer
- Prayer for Unity
- Fleeing to Odessa
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mission acting under their protection. My friend, Prof, de Sherbinin,
helped me to put the petition in good Russian. Some one undertook
the task of submitting it to the Minister of the Interior. The
Minister did not know that I had a hand in it. He was very favorable to
the matter, but he said the paragraphs were written more according
to the foreign customs than to suit the Russian ways. I went to a
lawyer asking him to write the paragraphs so as to suit the Russian
officials, but so that all the contents of my twelve paragraphs should
be covered in his text. He made more than thirty paragraphs, but in
such a way that you would have to read that paper very carefully to
find what was not included in it. The Minister examined the project
carefully and was satisfied.
Fleeing to Odessa
The hand of the government was weighing so heavily on me that I
had to flee again. I went now to Odessa on the Black Sea. The people
in Petrograd who took part in the new mode of mission work were
closely watched by the police. They wrote to me saying that I had
put them into a great plight and that they would never take any more
steps for establishing a temperance society. After half a year the
government wrote them: “The right to establish the Society is granted
to you; the statutes you submitted to us have been enacted into laws
and now we command you to establish that Society.” My friends then
had to establish their temperance society by order of the government.
But they were not remembering me in a friendly way for they
thought that I had brought upon them this hardship.
In Odessa I found several channels through which God had poured
the living water on the parched ground of the Russian mission field.
I will first mention the Molokan movement. There are many tokens
which tell us that the Molokan movement came originally from the
Quaker teaching. Therefore they have been sometimes called Russian
Quakers. English Friends must have been preaching the Gospel in
Russian long before Alexander I, because in a speech before a Molokan
commission he said to his ministers among other things: “These
people have suffered continual persecutions, all kinds of sufferings and
afilictions only for the sake of God’s Word. My grandmother
Catherine—may she rest in peace—punished them by banishment to Siberia, to
Archangel and to Cholmogori and filled the prisons with them. Even
in Tambov officials flogged two of them to death. But the number
of the persecuted did not decrease, but rather increased.” This
humane monarch gave the Molokans complete liberty in matters of
religion.
When I came to Odessa I was told that there were three hundred
thousand of these people spread over Russia. Another group similar
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