It was between the years 1762 and 1780 that the province of Kherson, in Southern Russia, was colonized with Suabian peasants. It came about this way.
The Empress Catharine, taking advantage of the discontent caused by the tyrannical rule of the then king of Wurtemberg, who wished to legislate a certain form of religion for all his subjects, sent them an invitation to come and settle in her dominions. She offered them rich allotments of land along the fertile banks of the Dnieper, and many other privileges, with the one prohibition, that they were not to proselytize among her Russian subjects.
As might be expected, these German peasants brought with them the religion and customs of their fatherland. They brought their pastors too, many of whom were earnest Christians, and very soon churches and schools had sprung up in these little colonies on the Russian steppe.
The state of the Russian peasantry at that time might be described as that of brutes rather than men, and it was quite natural when they looked on their German neighbors, and saw their clean and tidy homesteads, pervaded with an atmosphere of peace, piety and order, that they should have drawn a favorable contrast between them and the domains of their own priests, where dirt, drunkenness, and discord invariably reigned. These God-fearing Teutons too, after a time, when industry had filled their barns with plenty, began to gaze with compassion on the poor degraded Russian serfs, who, driven by want and hunger, had turned to them for employment, and when opportunity afforded, they would sit down beside them and spell out for them the German New Testament, and some of their German hymns.
“There was something pathetic― almost tragic― in the spectacle of elderly fathers and mothers of large families, and feeble old folk who were tottering on the brink of the grave, painfully spelling dissyllabic words, struggling with the vowels and diphthongs, and laboriously drawing pothooks and hangers in the intervals of fatiguing field labor.”
The dilapidated thatched hut of a Russian peasant family At first the barriers of national prejudices and the difference of language had kept them apart, and many years must have elapsed before the Empress Catharine’s prohibition could have been so forgotten as to permit them to fraternize on the forbidden topic of religion. Of these years we have little to relate, but we know that God’s Spirit was at work preparing the ground for the seed to be sown.
It was as if God had said, “I will work, and who shall hinder it?” (Isa. 43:1313Yea, before the day was I am he; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand: I will work, and who shall let it? (Isaiah 43:13)). And He can work by means of the consistent life of His people, as was probably the case here, for “sooner or later true life begins to tell....Some of the Russian peasants who had been helped in their poverty, or ministered to in their sickness by their German neighbors, began to attend their services, to keep the Stunden, or hours, of praise and power; they learned to read, were furnished with the New Testament in their own language, and eventually some of them found the deeper blessing of eternal life. In this simple scriptural fashion this memorable movement began. Men told their neighbors what God had done for their souls, and so the heavenly contagion spread from cottage to cottage, from village to village, and from province to province, till at length the Russian Stundists were found in all the provinces from the boundaries of the Austrian Empire in the West to the land of the Don Cossack in the East, and were supposed to number something like a quarter million souls.”
Let us trace the movement of God’s Spirit, for such it surely was.
There lived in the colony of Rohrbach, near the river Boug, and not far from the city of Odessa, a good and zealous German pastor, named Bonekemper. In the year 1858, “the birth year of Stundism,” as it has been called, he decided to invite those of the Russian laborers who had acquired an imperfect knowledge of the German language to attend their meetings, which were held at stated times in private houses. They had been accustomed in their German homes to go to church in the morning, and in the afternoon to meet in each other’s houses to read the Bible. This was their “Stunde,” or hour for reading, and it was the origin of the word “Stundists,” which was first applied to them by the priests of the neighborhood as a term of reproach. They do not call themselves by any name but that of Christians.
Bonekemper also procured from St. Petersburg a number of Russian New Testaments and tracts, which he distributed freely in the neighborhood. One of the most diligent attendants at the German Stunden in
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A Stundist Meeting
Rohrbach was a peasant named Onishtshenko, known as a disreputable tramp, who lived at Osnova, a Russian village not far from the Port of Nicolaieff. He was about thirty years of age in the year 1858, which was the date of his conversion and admission to membership with the German Stundists in Rohrbach. I mention him because he was really the first Russian Stundist, and God used him very distinctly to spread the Gospel amongst his countrymen.
His conversion is perhaps worth relating. He began to realize that his life was that of “a filthy brute,” and “one day, overwhelmed by a crushing sense of his guilt, he had thrown himself on the floor, and was fervently praying for forgiveness and light. ‘O God, enlighten me; make me a changed man.’ I besought Him with tears and sobs, when all at once it seemed as if someone tore the clothes from off my back, whereupon a marvelous sense of freedom, a feeling of intense joy came over me, and I knew God thenceforth.”
Burning with zeal to tell his comrades how great things God had done for his soul, Onishtshenko returned to Osnova, and began to preach the glad tidings to thirsty souls in whom the seed had already been sown. Crowds came to his cottage to hear the Word, and among the converts may be mentioned a young man named Michael Ratushni, gifted with much energy and heart for the Gospel.
“In two years, or before 1860, there was hardly a Russian hamlet in the neighborhood of Nicolaieff that had not its little company of earnest Stundists, teaching and praying, meeting together either openly or in secret, and zealously carrying forward a work dearer to them than life itself.”
Onishtshenko and Ratushni were real evangelists, and they tramped from village to village with their Master’s message. Sometimes they went about under the guise of peddlers, bookhawkers, or cobblers for since his conversion, Onishtshenko had not only learned to read and write, but also to make boots and shoes and as some scout had generally heralded their approach, it was no uncommon thing for them to find peasants from all the outlying hamlets awaiting them in a cottage or, perhaps, a hollow in the steppe. Here for the first time in their lives these poor famished souls listened eagerly to the gospel; and they bought New Testaments to take home with them, and hymns, roughly translated from the German, which they soon learned to sing.
“O head! once full of bruises,”
was one of their favorites. Also,
“When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Lord of glory died.”
All this, let us remember, took place in the province of Kherson. But these indefatigable missionaries soon moved on into Bessarabia, the Crimea, Ekaterinoslav, Kief and Podolia; and wherever they went, they were warmly received. We can form very little idea of the deep spiritual darkness in which these districts had been hitherto plunged. In the year 1860, in the province of Kief, it is said, that there was only one school for a population of 34,000 children, and that only one man in a thousand could read. On an average, for districts with populations of 5,000, there would be one church capable of accommodating 300.
Surely God was visiting this poor, dark continent with light and blessing from on high, and opening the door for His servants to preach the Word. “The gathering communities of Stundists bubbled over with zeal and enthusiasm, and wherever a man was found among them who had any gift of speech, he was giving all his spare time to telling others, near and at a distance the wonderful tidings that had brought peace to his own soul.” “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” Yet it was not only the preaching that took effect, but the lives of the converts, which underwent a complete change; and no wonder, when they had turned to God from idols, and had been called out of darkness into the marvelous light of Christ.
ILLUSTRATION