THE RUSSIAN . PILGRIMS.* WITH his usual love of the adventurous
and the unconven- tional, Mr. Stephen Graham has now written an interesting and important book ; he has made clear a whole new side of religion and economics and history, for " the journey of the Russian peasants to Jerusalem has never been described before in any language, not even in Russian." It seems incredible that to-day, in spite of the swift spread of modernism, and the generally felt desire to explain away the miracles and " difficulties" of the Christian belief, there can • With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem. By Stephen Graham. With 38 illustuntions from photographs by the author, and a num. London :
spat co. Ch. ed. wt.] •
still exist a spirit so credulous and a faith so simple as that which drives the Russian peasants year by year in their thousands to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. At first we are inclined to suspect Mr. Graham of being almost intrusive in disguising himself and going as a pilgrim among the pilgrims, and to think that his most remarkable photographs savour a little of the over-zealous journalist. But he is eo completely in sympathy with the pilgrim spirit that be may be allowed to share the hardships and the joys of pilgrimage : be seems to commend without reserve the "gospel of stupidity" upheld by the priests, and to wish unaltered the faith which finds its satisfaction in " pieces of the actual dress which the Virgin wore, or planks which Jesus planed,"—in the very basin even in which Pilate washed his hands. "Russian Christianity," he says," is living and growing, whilst that of the Greeks is dying and corrupting. . . . The Russians have superstition, they are simple, they can be deceived; but they have life, they have some individual and real revelation which came, not as spoon meat from an idle priest, but es vision front the Living God."
Yet Mr. Graham is not blind to the many abuses of the Russian Church in Palestine; he holds the balance truly, and is ready to admit the drunkenness of the priests, the com- mercialism of the monks, the occasional irreverence of some of the pilgrims, and the amazing lack of education among them, for " it must be remembered, it is entirely a matter of the peasants : there are no clean middle or upper class people there at all.' Only he would have us admire the courage and enthusiasm which inspire these pilgrimages, when the distressing dis- comforts of the voyage, the privations of the Lenten fast, the long hundred-mile tramp to the Lake of Galilee, are all endured without a murmur, rather with singing and a happy heart, for the love of God.
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