Untitled article by C. P. B.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · December 8, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 48

Persecution in Russia and America.

By C. P. B.

The persecution of Seventh-day Adventists in Tennessee with the avowed object of either driving them from the State or of compelling them to practically abandon their faith, gives an added interest to the details of the persecution of Stundists in Russia.

As in Tennessee the Adventists are regarded as a nuisance, so in Russia the Stundists are classed with famine and cholera. In a recent article in the Congregationalist, Rev. Benjamin Labaree says:—

The civilized world has been watching with painful interest the efforts of the Russian Government to rid itself of the four great pests, famine, cholera, the Jews and the “Stundists,” for if information which reaches us through public and private channels be correct, the last are counted no less a plague than the others. The hierarchy is moving to stamp them out in the same determined temper and by methods equally vigorous and ruthless.

“And yet,” says Mr. Labaree, “these persecuted people represent spiritual revival in the Russian Church which carries with it all that is dearest and noblest to the heart of evangelical Christendom. Vital piety as against dead religious formalism, spiritual intelligence as against crass ignorance and gross superstition, sobriety for inebriety, thrift for improvidence, mark the contrasts between these Russian Puritans and the mass of their neighbors, church ecclesiastics testifying thereto.”

But the Orthodox Church in Russia wants no revival of religion. A revival of genuine religion would be the death blow to priestcraft, and the utter destruction of priestly influence; hence, the persecution of the Stundists at the instigation of the Russian priests.

The origin of the Stundist reformation in Russia is told thus briefly by Mr. Labaree:—

About thirty-five years ago the work began in

the little village of Rohrbach, near Odessa, under the noble labors of two German pastors named Bonnekemper, father and son. The younger Bonnekemper received his religious training in America. On the death of his father he returned to Russia and took up the work already inaugurated with great energy and devotion. It was his practice to invite the Russian farm hands, in the service of the German colonists, to attend the “stunden” or “hours” for religious edification which had been instituted for his German parishioners. The name of the people, “Stundists,” is thus derived. Friendly officials warned Bonnekemper of the risk he ran in thus tampering with members of the Orthodox Church, and his labors were consequently much restricted. But a blaze was kindled that was to sweep widely through the empire.

Of the persecution of the Stundists, an English gentleman says:—

The persecutions they endure are incredible, so opposed are they to the improved humanities of which we boast in the nineteenth century. Families are broken up, children torn from their parents to be put under Orthodox [Russian Church] guardianship, men are hauled to jails and convict stations without a shadow of a trial, they are loaded with chains, their bodies clothed with foul prison clothes, they tramp in chains across the Caucasian snows with gangs of desperadoes of the worst type. Words fail me to express a tithe of the indignities practiced on these innocent brethren.

This gentleman styles these people “innocent,” and yet they are violators of the civil law, and are punished under the color and form of civil law, just as truly as are the Adventists in Tennessee; and in proceeding against them the authorities are only “enforcing the law.” The majority of the people of Russia are members of the Orthodox Church, and if the Stundists do not want to conform to the precepts of that religion and to the customs of the country which are so intimately related to it that they can not be separated from it, they can leave. It is thus that the Russian authorities reason, and it is thus that the authorities of Henry County, Tenn., reason concerning the Adventists. After all religious persecution and the reasons for it are not essentially different in Russia and America. Human nature is the same everywhere, and bigotry and intolerance flourish and bring forth fruit in it whether in the Old or in the New World.

C. P. B.