Revival Of Religion In Soviet Russia

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 270, 13 November 1943, Page 4

Revival Of Religion In Soviet Russia

"DELIGION is Tike a nail, the harder you hit it, the further it goes into the wood," says Sir Bernard Pares in his article, "Religion in Russia," which appeared in the last issue of Foreign Affairs. Not Christianity alone, but everything, thrives on persecution. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," and it's still being By Ret). C. W. Chandler sown. That is why the Church in Russia, corrupt as it may have been in Czarist days, was bound to emerge anew, cleansed and purified, from the fire of persecution. My own interest in Tolstoy, which interest increases with the years, has helped me clearly to understand the Russian temperament. It is, and ever has been, intensely religious. Even their atheism has been a "religious" atheism, and never at any time since 1917 has any appreciable proportion of Russia's millions been "intelligently" atheistic. A negation cannot be taught, hence all the blatant attempts of early revolutionaries to ridicule religion, and to set the minds of children against it by opening antireligious museums, wherein were exhibited blasphemous posters, and ludicrous effigies of saints, were doomed to failure. "One-tliird of the town population, and two-thirds of | the country population (which is. of course, much more numerous) are still open believers." When the churches were closed, ikons and religious pictures turned every cottage into a chapel, and since that time the religious trend in Russia has been toward simple Bible Christianity, although the recent consecration of an Orthodox Bishop in Moscow, at which consecration the Archbishop of York was present, points to the regrowth of that more ornate form of worship which is so much more akin to the Russian mind. To the atheistically inclined all this will appear to be but the survival of superstition, rather than the definite revival of religion, but they are wrong, and human nature itself gives the lie to any such conclusion. Massacre of Priests "The attack on the Church has driven religion back to the individual conscience," continues Sir Bernard Pares. Neither the "Union of the Godless," nor the dialectical materialism of Marxian Communism, nor the massacring of 1000 priests, and as many as 40 bishops during the civil war, nor the abolition of the Sabbath or Sunday rest, have succeeded in eliminating from the Slav mind that deeply religious instinct which, in greater or lesser degree, is a part of the natural composition of every human being. Truth is that the people of Russia have ever been more religious than the Church. This applies not only to peasants, but also to the finest intellects in the country. Instincts cannot be eradicated. Nowhere in the world has there ever been such a solidly-organised opposition to religion, and ere long it will be amply demonstrated, once again, that "the gates of hell cannot prevail" against it. Life doesn't make sense without God. Without an acknowledgment of Him there is neither "come from" nor "go to" for any of us. Nothing but a senseless round of useless striving, with screaming and crying at one end, and death, corruption and decay at the other. There is no such thing as purposelessness, and ignorant and learned alike ultimately must agree on this point. "The giants of Russian literature, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsk.y were all permeated with religion," and any attempt to stamp it out in Russia was from the first doomed to failure. Triumph of Faith Sir Bernard Pares goes on to record that the famous Iberian chapel, over which was placed the Marxian motto, "Religion is the dope for the masses," has been reopened, and the paper called The Godless has had to cease publication "owing to shortage of paper." He concludes by saying that, although we cannot with certainty predict the future, "we have every, reason to believe that the attempt to extirpate faith from the Russian spirit has failed, and that this failure has been recognised in Russia." It would be the height of ignorance to say "I told you so," but I would like to add that the least in the Kingdom of God (as it pertains to the redeemed on earth) could have predicted this 26 years ago. "Russia is still the most religious country in Europe," and, says one critic, "it sometimes falls to one or other branches of the Christian Church to stand in the front line. That honour has fallen to the Church-of Russia, and in our harassed churches you. will find a fervour of devotion which I should be happy to see in the churches of Western Europe." A similar dose of persecution would do the rest of us no end of good, and that's principally why I so fervently believe in the necessity of atheism. Faith, like a kite, will only rise when the wind is against it. With the astounding success of Russian arms has come, paradoxically enough, a revival of religion.! On both the material and the spiri-: tual fronts victory is imminent.