Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 61:241 (Jan 1904)
Article: Influence Of The Russian Liturgy
Author: Anonymous

BSac 61:241 (Jan 1904) p. 166

Influence Of The Russian Liturgy

In a journey across Asia three years ago, occupying several months, I was deeply impressed by the many evidences of the leavening power of Christianity throughout the Russian Empire. In Japan, one of the most successful and influential Christian missions is that of the Russian Church, under the leadership of Bishop Nicolai, at Tokyo. My first attendance upon a Russian church service was at Port Arthur, where I found myself crowding for standing room with an indiscriminate company of Cossacks of the rank and officers of every grade, including Admiral Alexieff, and hearing, as ever afterwards in the Russian service, the crying of infants in arms, who are regularly brought by their parents to the church service, to receive the communion. Later, while journeying upon the construction train which penetrated Manchuria, I spent some days in the company of a benevolent-hearted inferior church official who was collecting money for alms to be administered by the church. Everywhere his reception was most cordial by all classes.

In all the villages and cities of Siberia and Turkestan, the priest, with his family, evidently occupied a position of great respect and influence, and was looked to with unfailing confidence by the poorer classes for sympathy and help. Repeatedly fairs of the Red Cross Society were encountered, engaged in raising money to provide nurses and assistance, not only for the hospitals in the army, but for those which are erected at the prominent points frequented by emigrants and exiles. In all the post-houses throughout a fourteen-hundred-mile drive through Turkestan, copies of the New Testament, furnished by the Imperial Bible Society at St. Petersburg, and

BSac 61:241 (Jan 1904) p. 167

bearing the imprint of the British and Foreign Bible Society, were found in the waiting-rooms.

In the wilds of Transbaikalia, as well as in the deserts of Turkestan, penetrated by the railroad, cars were met, provided with priests, and singers, and all the paraphernalia necessary for a church service. At one place in Transbaikalia, where a church car was sidetracked for a few days to meet the wants of the locality, our train stopped long enough for such a service. The third and fourth-class passengers immediately surrounded it, and participated with the greatest reverence. In the larger churches in Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk, we encountered beautiful young women of good estate, conducting classes of untrained boys to the services, and watching over them with all the interest displayed by those connected with the “settlements” in our own country. In fact, everywhere we were surrounded by that indefinable atmosphere which we characterize as Christian civilization, and which is in as striking contrast with heathen civ...