DOUKHOBOR WAYS

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 June 1932, Page 4

DOUKHOBOR WAYS

A CURIOUS SECT. The Doukhobors, the cables report, have been in trouble again—that is, paraded nude and annoyed the police of Nelson, British Columbia. The pciice seized 117 Doukhobors, and some received prison terms, says the Sydney “Sun.” Doukhobors have been annoying authority since they first became an established sect in the Ukraine about 1750. Like the Quakers, they refuse to take an oath or fight a battle. But, unlike Quakers, they are wholly unchristian and reject the Bible. They refuse to pay taxes or register births, deaths, or marriages; to eat meat, or to use animal labour on their farms; to take part in commercial life' or use money. Their two American colonies, transplanted from the Wet Mountains in Georgia, in 1899, live on a communal basis, owning no property individually. In the British Columbia community each member is a total abstainer, a non-smoker, and a vegetarian. The Doukhobors have no religious ceremonies whatever. Marriage is by. ararrangement, and the only conditions necessary for it are puberty and agreement.

Lately the sad state of the world has urged them to hold processions in the nude, to try to impress on the public a sense of sin. A Doukhobor never fights—but offers a passive resistance which consists of linking arms with his brethren and standing still while police charge the naked ranks. Some idea of the sanctity of nakedness has always been apparent in the sect. In 1903, when certain of them set out from Saskatchewan to march to the far north-west, 'they tramped without boots or.hats, and it is related by one of them that when they approached a town both men and women “stood, undressed, and then advanced.”