gh an imperfect morality impairs and cripples the
adequate witness, the full unfettered enjoyment of it. And, as another
writer has lately done in the political sphere, I would plead for the
Russians that "they did not get a fair start."

I have already described the rough-and-ready way in which they were
converted to Christianity, never having anything like our opportunities
of instruction from the first. I have never heard a Russian sermon! The
vast majority of the clergy have never been trained to preach, and would
not be able to do so if they tried. The people are not taught at all in
church, except by what is read to them in Scripture, or what they read
for themselves. Let Englishmen give them "fair play" all round, both in
political and constitutional, and also in moral deficiencies; and let us
remember that it was to a body of real and earnest Christians--"saints"
and "faithful," he himself calls them--that S. Paul found it necessary
to write and caution against "the lusts of the flesh, foolish talking
and unseemly jesting, covetousness and uncleanness, lying and stealing."
If it was necessary to write those fifth and sixth chapters of the
Ephesians to a body of Christian believers of whose sincerity an
Apostle had no doubt, we may well have hopeful patience with a great
body of our fellow Christians whose want of consistency in conduct
provokes such ready criticism. It is well known how a mystical people
like the West Indians (I have described it at length in a former book,
_A Bishop among Bananas_, in chap. v) resent being accused of theft when
helping themselves to "GOD'S gifts," as they call them, in the shape of
fruit and fowls, when they would not dream of taking money, clothing, or
other material things, or would consider themselves thieves if they did.
And so it interested me to learn the other day that the Russian peasant
views thefts of the same kind of things in much the same way, drawing in
his mind a distinction between that which GOD gives for all and that
which man produces for himself. It is imperfect reasoning, we know, as
there is no real distinction between what a man produces by cultivation
and what he manufactures; but we can understand an untrained and rather
childlike mind making such a distinction.

The devout Russian peasantry in this stage often seem to illustrate our
LORD'S words concerning things revealed to "babes" which even the "wise
and prudent" seem to miss. Sir Donald M. Wallace