Up to the year 1878, Alexander II. refrained from persecuting them, possibly because he felt some sympathy with men who were fast raising themselves and their fellows above the old level of brutish ignorance.  But in that year the Greek Church pressed him to take action.  If he chastised them with whips, his son lashed them with scorpions.  He saw that they were sapping the base of one of the three pillars that supported the imperial fabric—­Orthodoxy, in the Russian sense.  Orders went forth to stamp out the heretic pest.  At once all the strength of the governmental machine was brought to bear on these non-resisting peasants.  Imprisonment, exile, execution—­such was their lot.  Their communities, perhaps the happiest then to be found in rural Russia, were broken up, to be flung into remote corners of Transcaucasia or Siberia, and there doomed to the regime of the knout or the darkness of the mines[234].  According to present appearances the persecutors have succeeded.  The evangelical faith seems to have been almost stamped out even in South Russia; and the Greek Church has regained its hold on the allegiance, if not on the beliefs and affections, of the masses.

[Footnote 234:  See an article by Count Leo Tolstoy in the Contemporary Review for November 1895; also a pamphlet on “The Stundists,” with Preface by Rev. J. Brown, D.D.]

To account for this fact, we must remember the immense force of tradition and custom among a simple rural folk, also that very many Russians sincerely believe that their institutions and their national creed were destined to regenerate Europe.  See, they said in effect, Western Europe oscillates between papal control and free thought; its industries, with their laissez faire methods, raise the few to enormous wealth and crush the many into a new serfdom worse than the old.  For all these evils Russia has a cure; her autocracy saves her from the profitless wrangling of Parliaments; her national Church sums up the beliefs and traditions of nobles and peasants; and at the base of her social system she possesses in the “Mir” a patriarchal communism against which the forces of the West will beat in vain.  Looking on the Greek Church as a necessary part of the national life, they sought to wield its powers for nationalising all the races of that motley Empire.  “Russia for the Russians,” cried the Slavophils.  “Let us be one people, with one creed.  Let us reverence the Czar as head of the Church and of the State.  In this unity lies our strength.”  However defective the argument logically, yet in the realm of sentiment, in which the Slavs live, move, and have their being, the plea passed muster.  National pride was pressed into the service of the persecutors; and all dissenters, whether Roman Catholics of Poland, Lutherans of the Baltic Provinces, or Stundists of the Ukraine, felt the remorseless grinding of the State machine, while the Greek Church exalted its horn as it had not done for a century past.