Under Three Tsars. By R. S. Latimer. (Morgan and Scott.
3s. 6d. net.)—The swing of the Russian pendulum in the region of religious toleration is strongly marked. We need not go back beyond Alex- ander I. It was not so much as thought of before him. He at least formulated the principle in public documents. His successor was sternly repressive. Then another Alexander went back to his grand- father's policy, which the third of the name reversed. And now a second Nicholas takes it up again. It is with these three—i.e., with a pericd of a little over half-a-century—that Mr. Latimer concerns himself. His own sympathies are, as might be supposed, strongly with the seceders from the Orthodox Church, though he recognises the defects of some of the morements,—of that of the Dukhobors, for instence. Of their eccentricities our Canadian kinsmen have bad Peculiar experience. But religious thought in Russia takes some strange ferias. What could be more so than the Old Believer secession ? 'When the Patriarch Nikon decided that three fingers, not two, should be 1 fted in benediction, that the Greek cross should be substituted for the Latin, that Hallelujah should be said thrice, not twice, a conflict as furious as that which lit the Smithfield fires followed. But we must not let such things prejudice us against the pathetic story cf constancy under persecution which is told in this volume, These Stuedists, Baptists, and others—we gather that Mr. Latimer is in special sympathy with the Baptists—are very much in earnest. This, indi ed, is the natural turn of the Russian mind,—to take things se: iously. So much credit must be allowed even to those with whom we are least in sympathy,—with Pobmlonostseff, for instance, who was the evil genius of Alexander III. A pitiless persecutor, he un erely believed that he was doing God good service.
Previous page
