the Church. Further arrests were made, arbitrary arrests most of them, made at the instigation of the priests. The secretaries complained to one of the Archbishop's "missionaries" that they were being arrested everywhere, and desired to know where it would all end. "End!" exclaimed the priest ominously, "it is only beginning."
The meetings continued to increase in numbers. "Whole villages gave in their adhesion to Protestantism, and it was computed that in the province of Kherson alone about 30,000 peasants had now joined the movement, and had severed connection with the Orthodox Church. In other provinces, notably in Bessarabia, the cause was also winning its way with wonderful strides. We are unable, unfortunately, to give any definite details of its growth in Bessarabia, but there can be little doubt that this growth was owing more to the labours of German colonists settled there than to the preaching of the Russian brethren from Kherson. The villagers on the lower and middle Dnieper were now all infected with the new heresy, so were the far-lying hamlets in the Crimea, so were some of the stanitsi in the country of the Don Cossacks. When the year 1870 opened, the 70,000 peasants, who were computed at that time to have joined the Stundist movement, were spread over the ten provinces between the Austrian frontier and the Volga—Podolia, Volhynia, Bessarabia, Kief, Kherson, Poltava, Ekaterinoslav, the Taurida, Kursk, and the land of the Don Cossacks. There is reason to suppose that before this period certain villages in the provinces of Orel and Chernigov were also slightly affected. Very little information is forthcoming as to how the Gospel message found its way into these vast territories. The wind blew where it listed, and people heard the sound thereof, but could not tell whence it came or whither it went. The Spirit of God was in the movement, and who can record or measure the Spirit's doings?
