§2. _Religion_.--The last paragraph will read strangely to those people whose only ideas about Russia are gleaned from newspaper accounts of the revolution of 1905. We shall come back to the revolution and its significance later; but meanwhile we must notice another very striking fact about Russian life--its all-pervading religious atmosphere. Russia is a land of peasants. In England and Wales 78 per cent of the population live in towns and the remaining 22 per cent in the country; in Russia something like 87 per cent live in the country as against 13 per cent in the towns. These figures are enough to show where the real centre of gravity of the Russian nation lies. The peasant, or _moujik_, is a primitive and generally an entirely illiterate person, but he possesses qualities which his more sophisticated brothers in the West may well envy and admire, a profound common-sense, a grand simplicity of life and outlook, and an unshakable faith in the unseen world. The interior of Russia is almost wholly unknown in the West; until a few years back it was as much of a _terra incognita_ as Central Africa. But the revolution led English writers and journalists to explore it, and when the dust and smoke of that upheaval, which had obscured the truth from the eyes of Europe, passed away, an astonished world perceived the real Russia for the first time. "Russia," writes Mr. Stephen Graham, who has done more than any other man to bring the truth home to us, "is not a land of bomb-throwers, is not a land of intolerable tyranny and unhappiness, of a languishing and decayed peasantry, of a corrupt and ugly church; the Russians are an agricultural nation, bred to the soil, illiterate as the savages, and having as yet no ambition to live in the towns; they are as strong as giants, simple as children, mystically superstitious by reason of their unexplained mystery." Russia is in fact 145 million peasants--ploughing and praying. And here once again one is reminded of the Middle Ages. Cross the Russian frontier and you enter the mediaeval world. Miracles are believed in, holy men are revered as saints, thousands of pilgrims journey on foot every year to Jerusalem, which is to every true believer the centre of the universe and therefore becomes at Easter almost a Russian city. Russia is the most Christian country in the world, and her people are the most Christ-like. The turbulence and violence, so contrary to the Christian spirit, which was an inseparable feature of mediaeval feudalism is absent from Russia; and the gospel of non-resistance, of brotherly love, of patience under affliction, of pity and mercy, which Tolstoi preached so eloquently to the world at large, he learnt from two teachers--the peasant of modern Russia and the Peasant of ancient Palestine, who was crucified upon the Cross.