Progress Amid Trial

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 26, 1908

Progress Amid Trial

“You need not pray; your God will not hear you.” These were the scoffing words oft repeated by the keeper of a Crimean jail to our first missionaries sent to Russia in 1886. Almost immediately they had landed in jail, accused of preaching heresy. In the old Russia this was a charge equivalent to a sentence to Siberia, and the jailer assured them that this was the road they would soon be marching over. But when, after forty days, by intervention of the United States minister, orders for the release of our two brethren were wired from St. Petersburg, the jailer, who himself delivered the message, said, “Your God has heard you.”

In the years that followed, the message spread far and wide in Russia. Often the workers were imprisoned; the believers were exiled. Others took joyfully the spoiling of their goods to pay fines levied for attending sectarian meetings. “Brother John Perk and others,” says Elder H. J. Loebsack, writing of the former days, “often escaped death only through the use of the rustic costume of the Russians. Under such circumstances,” he says, “the Lord has blessed the work, and spread the truth through the whole of European Russia, and now the message has advanced even into Siberia, and on to the Chinese frontier.”

Then in 1905 came the new policy in Russia; and a modified degree of religious liberty, amounting to a wholesale deliverance, was proclaimed throughout the empire. In the next year, soon after an address signed by the officers of our conferences and mission fields in Russia had been presented to the czar, the Russian minister of the interior, M. Stolypin, issued a decree specifically granting religious liberty to the Seventh-day Adventists.

Last year, just twenty-one years from the time when our work began in Russia, delegates assembled in union conference at Riga sent the following greeting to America:—

“Psalm 133, Greeting. We rejoice that during the last twenty-one years, Almighty God has so blessed the humble efforts of his children in this vast empire, with its one hundred forty millions of people, speaking one hundred languages, that it is now possible to organize a union conference, the union composed of three conferences and three mission fields, with a membership of twenty-five hundred.

“We heartily thank the brethren in America and throughout the world for their generous aid and sympathy in former years, when we suffered persecution and imprisonment and banishment.”