p. 842 | THE BIBLE IN RUSSIA

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 12, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 53.

THE BIBLE IN RUSSIA.

THE British and Foreign Bible Society is being seriously checked in Russia. About eight months ago the society was informed that its shop in the city of Kieff—the Russian Jerusalem, and a great resort of pilgrims—must be closed for six months, by order of the Minister of the Interior. The governor of Kieff has now gone further. When an effort was recently made to have the shop reopened, he replied by strictly prohibiting colportage in the four large provinces over which he has jurisdiction, and by publishing in the newspapers throughout the empire that he does so because the colporters of the Bible Society are actively engaged as Stundist propagandists. There can be, of course, little doubt that the distribution of the Scriptures among the villages of Russia has vastly helped the cause of evangelical truth, and that hundreds and thousands of the peasants known as Stundists owe their light to the reading of the Bible; but it is denied absolutely that the colporters have been engaged in the work of preaching or teaching. Their simple duty, as in the case of the colporters of the American Bible Society, which they do not overstep, and which they are strictly forbidden to overstep, is to sell the Bibles and Testaments with which the Bible Society supplies them.—Christian Cynosure.