It is needless to add that profligacy and laziness are not the only vices against which Russian Christianity has to contend. Their people have another in common with ourselves of which the Church is only too well aware and which it is making great efforts to suppress, namely, drunkenness. Actually on our journey we had an example of this vice which every one regarded as comic, but which might have been tragic. The train is brought suddenly to a standstill. There is something wrong. Everybody tumbles out of the carriage to look. A man is lying in the snow. At first it is thought he has been knocked down by a previous train. Further examination shows that it is only a man dead drunk lying right across the line--the result of keeping one of the festivals of the Church. Every one laughs; he is pulled out of the way, we climb back into the train, leaving him in the care of a priest, quite unconscious how near he has been to death. Drunkenness is a terrible evil in our own land, but its results are far more terrible in {336} this land of frost-bite. There are numbers of people without hands and feet begging in the street, and we were told that the general cause of these injuries was vodka. A man going home falls into a drunken sleep on the way: he awakes next morning with his hands and feet frost-bitten, or perhaps he never wakes again: the sleep of drunkenness merges into the sleep of death. As one considers these things one realises why the Buddhist Bouriat and the Mohammedan Tartar still adhere to their ancient faiths. I do not think an Englishman has a right to criticise other nations when so much remains to be done at home. Still one cannot truthfully say that, however numerous her churches or well-attended her services, the Orthodox Church directs Russia while she is powerless to make headway against these vices. The great trials through which Russia has passed hold out every reason to hope that with liberty, purity of worship will be again established, and where there is purity of faith there must be mission work. No doubt the Government has hindered mission work; in fact, they have forbidden it in China. Christianity was to them so much the handmaid of the State as to be inconceivable outside the State; but all this is breaking down. The great mission work conducted in Japan to which I have before referred has shown that the Orthodox Church grows well on Eastern soil. The existence of a village preserving the Orthodox religion in the middle of China which has been spoken of above, has demonstrated at least the vitality of that faith among the Chinese nation. When the Russian missionaries cross the frontier they will not leave their own country weaker, but their work will be a token that Russia is purifying her faith and is advancing along the road that leads to holiness. {337} INDEX