space at our disposal to enter into the details of this persecution in every one of the thirteen provinces over which the Stundists were distributed; all we can do in this and the following chapter is to notice certain phases of this nineteenth century Inquisition, and to present our readers with a rough outline of the loving methods taken by "Holy" Russia to win back to the fold the sheep who had strayed from the fat pastures of Orthodoxy into the stony and famished byways of Dissent.
From 1878 to 1882 the police raiding continued, but it had no effect in the desired direction. Deprived of their New Testaments and hymn-books, the Stundists quietly procured others; prevented from meeting for worship in their cottages they went out to the open steppe. If the old presbyters and deacons could not leave their localities for the purpose of confirming the more remote and weaker churches, other presbyters were ordained who could. There was no dismay, no faltering. And the authorities soon recognised this. A blagotchin, or rural dean, writing in 1881, said: "We must sorrowfully confess that, notwithstanding the earnest attempts made by the Church to wean these schismatics from their errors, notwithstanding admonition and prayerful entreaty, notwithstanding the gentle and paternal pressure of the worldly powers, they continue in their stiff-necked course, and evince no desire to be reconciled to us." The "gentle and paternal pressure" is delicious. After 1882 stronger measures were adopted. The ispravniki, or local commissaries of police—men generally of a common and rough type, whose tyrannical methods are proverbial—were empowered to levy arbitrary fines on peasants who continued to attend Stundist meetings after a warning to absent themselves. The fines were not to exceed twenty roubles, but twenty roubles is as much to an impoverished Russian peasant as £20 would be to an English agricultural labourer.
