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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, August 27, 1867

—What must be the state of religion in Russia? or what kind of a Heaven are the priests of the Greek church expecting, seeing the plain declaration stands upon the sacred record, that no drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God? An exchange says:—

“There is a wide field for teetotal missionaries in Russia, and the first converts should be the priests of the Greek church. They drink fearfully and continually. On the patron’s day the priest is bound after mass to take saint’s icon, and bear it from one end of the village to the other, entering into each cottage, blessing the inmates with the icon, and drinking one, sometimes even two glasses of brandy to their health. The consequence is, that by the time the procession is over, the priest, his deacon, and choristers, all of them dead drunk, are put upon a cart together with the icon, and taken back to the parsonage by the soberest among the peasants, or still more frequently by some of their wives.”