(a) To repeal all the laws under which any secession from the established Church is punislied as a crime.
(b) To allow Old-Believers,[1] Baptists, Molokans,[2] Stundists,[3] and others, to open and maintain churches, chapels, and houses of prayer.
(c) To allow religious meetings and the preaching of all faiths.
(d) Not to hinder people of different faiths from educating their children in those faiths.
It is necessary to do this because, apart from the fact shown by history and science, and generally admitted, that religious persecutions fail to effect their object, and even produce a reverse effect by strengthening what people wish to destroy—and apart from the fact that the intervention of Government in matters of faith produces that most harmful and therefore worst of vices, hypocrisy, which Christ so strongly denounced,—not to speak of all that, the interference of Government in matters of faith hinders each individual and the whole people from attaining that highest blessing—union with one another. For union is attained, not by the forcible and impossible retention of all men in the bonds of one and the same external, once-accepted, confession of a religious teaching to which infallibility is attributed, but only by the free advance of the whole of humanity towards truth, which alone, therefore, can truly unite men.
Such are the modest and easily realizable desires, we believe, of the immense majority of the Russian people.
- ↑ The Old-Believers is a general name for the sects that separated from the Russo-Greek Church in the seventeenth and early in the eighteenth centuries.
- ↑ The Molokans are a more modern sect. They reject the Sacraments and the ceremonial of the Russo-Greek Church, and pay much attention to the Bible.
- ↑ Stundist is a general name for the Protestant and rationalistic sects of many shades that have rapidly sprung up and increased, chiefly in South Russia, during the last quarter of a century.
