Religious Persecution in Russia
Intolerance in Russia seems to be growing. It was thought that there would be freedom under the new régime, but it seems that it has been nearly withdrawn. Our own people have suffered much the last year or so, and the Baptists are also persecuted. In a recent meeting held in New York, experience was given by a number of Russians of what they had themselves suffered. One man who accepted the Baptist faith when he was thirty-eight years old, having considered Baptists "crazy" previous to that, told how he was banished to Transcaucasia, his property all confiscated, his family broken up and the members scattered hundreds of miles apart. He was loaded with heavy chains and told that he would be set free and all his rights restored if he would renounce the Baptists' religion. That failing, he was subjected to harsher treatment, scourged and beaten until his body was a mass of welts, and while half dead offered freedom. Every morning for nine long years he was brought to the chief of police. He finally was released on condition that he leave the country. Another man told of the Siberian chain-gangs in which he was placed, and thirty-one different prisons in which he served, simply because he was a Baptist; and others suffered about the same degree. And yet Russia is called a Christian country, and there are people in this land who wish to make America a Church-and-State country — religion by law. If we want to know how it works out, let us look to Russia. It would seem as tho every Baptist in America would repudiate that for which their church federation is working.