Vladimir Tchertkoff

“ The Spirit-Wrestlers themselves do not ask for help—neither those who are in exile with their families, famished, and with starving and sick children, nor those who are being slowly but surely tortured to death in the prisons. They die without uttering a single cry for help, knowing why and for what they suffer. ”

“ The Spirit-Wrestlers found alike their mutual relations and their relations to other people—and not only to people, but to all living creatures—exclusively on love; and, therefore, they hold all people equal, brethren. They extend this idea of equality also to the Government authorities; obedience to whom they do not consider binding upon them in those cases when the demands of these authorities are in conflict with their conscience; while, in all that does not infringe what they regard as the will of God, they willingly fulfil the desire of the authorities. ”

“ And in what light, before that court of eternal love and truth, do those men appear, who are unable to go against their consciences in taking part in military service, and whose earthly lot is at the present time in your hands? To the God of love these men naturally appear as His most faithful and obedient servants. They have believed with simplicity and whole-heartedness in the truth and immutability of those demands of love which He has Himself implanted in their hearts, and disclosed to them in the life and teaching of Jesus. ”

“ The conception they have of Christ is based on the teaching of the gospel: they acknowledge His coming in the flesh, His works, teaching, and suffering; but chiefly they accept all this in the spiritual sense, and affirm that all contained in the gospel should be accomplished in ourselves. Thus Christ must in us be begotten, born, grow up, teach, suffer, die, revive and ascend; and it is thus that they understand the process of the new birth, or renovation of man. They say that Jesus Himself was and is the Gospel eternal and living, and has sent it forth, preached in the Word. ”

“ My native country I love, because I cannot help loving it. But I love it not with that blind prejudice which seeks to justify all its dark and humiliating iniquities; I love it without shutting my eyes to all the atrocities perpetrated in it and to all the sufferings of its oppressed masses. Such prejudice would not be love, but patriotic vanity,—a sentiment which always does immeasurable harm to the nation towards which it is directed. Loving my country, I try to love and appreciate in it that which is highest and best. ”

“ These men differ from others only in having placed the divine love towards man higher than everything else, and having become so penetrated with its spirit and obligations that they can in no way consent either to kill, or to learn to kill their fellow-beings. The will of God has become more binding to them than anything else in the world, and they have gone to prison, to martyrdom, to death—solely that they may not transgress the demands of this divine love, by which they live. ”

“ But neither the severe climate nor the neighbourhood of wild and warlike hillsmen shook the faith of the Spirit-Wrestlers, who, in the course of the half-century they passed in the Wet Hills, transformed this wilderness into flourishing colonies, and continued to live the same Christian and laborious life they had lived before. But, as nearly always happens with people, the temptation of the wealth which they attained to in the Caucasus weakened their moral force, and little by little they began to depart somewhat from the requirements of their belief. ”

“ We can only, in the presence of God, while humbly acknowledging the purity and saintliness of the motives of these His children, thank them for the light with which they illumine the darkness around us, for the true love with which they warm our frozen hearts. ”

“ There are only two means to help people persecuted for faith's sake. One consists in the fulfilment of the Christian commandment, to welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned, and feed the hungry, which is prescribed to us both by our own hearts and by the Gospel; the other consists in appealing to the persecutors, both to those who prescribe the persecutions and to those who allow them to take place when they might stop them ”

“ The dead they commemorate by good deeds, and in no other way. God Himself, they say, will remember the righteous in His kingdom. Therefore they do not pray for the dead, deeming it useless. The death of a Christian they do not call death but change; therefore they do not say " our brother has died,"but" our brother has changed."
14. Concerning the state of the righteous in heaven, they say that the kingdom is in man's will, and that heaven is in the soul; that the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and, therefore, no torments of hell can touch them. ”

“ In the eyes of God these men manifestly suffer for us; they undergo torture for love of their neighbour, i.e. of me, of you, of all who are dear to us. How then can we fail to recognise our sacred duty before God, to do all in our power to afford them that support which they, as men, cannot at times but need, and to alleviate their sufferings, the weight of which must sometimes be almost beyond their strength? ”

“ If they sin against their brethren, they confess before all, and ask their brethren to forgive them.
To deny one's sins when others remark them, is regarded by the Spirit- Wrestlers as a great wrong. They also condemn the practice of calling oneself a sinner, and making this a kind of boast, a sham meekness, to excuse one from trying to correct one's errors. When a man has fallen he should immediately recover himself, ask God's forgiveness with humbled heart, and with all his might strive not to fall again into a similar sin. ”

“ Next, in August 1896, died Michael Scherbinin in the Ekaterinograd penal battalion, tortured to death by flogging, and by being thrown with violence over the wooden horse in the gymnasium. Among those confined in the prisons, many have already died. Some of them, while dying, were locked up in separate rooms, and neither their fellow-prisoners, nor parents, wives and children who had come to bid them farewell, were allowed even to enter the room where the dying lay, alone and helpless. More deaths are to be expected both among the population suffering from want in exile and in the prisons. ”

“ Of all the unfortunate dupes of the Government, they are the most deluded, and therefore, in a certain sense, of all its representatives the least influential and the most helpless. And indeed it cannot be otherwise as long as the so-called autocratic form of government is maintained in Russia, with its necessary absence of publicity and of freedom of speech. ”

“ The Spirit-Wrestlers deem that all externalism in the work of salvation is utterly useless, and that the external Church, owing to the lapse of true Christianity, has become a den of robbers; and they therefore acknowledge one sacred, universal and apostolic Church, which the Lord by His coming has assembled, consecrated and replenished by the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and which is, of course, the union of all faithful and true Christians. ”

“ This baptism takes place when a man repents with a pure and willing heart, and calls upon God, and then his sins are remitted, and he turns to God, and not to the world. This is the only baptism for the remission of sins which they profess.
The new birth and baptism, according to their understanding, are one and the same. The means of attaining the new birth are living faith in God and prayer. The signs of the newly born, or baptized, are the works of the new man.
The consummation of baptism or new birth, they say, a man attains when he is united to God ”

“ Thus at their meetings they hear the Word of God from each other; each one may express what he knows or feels for the benefit of his brethren; the women are not excluded from this, for, as they say, women also have understanding, and light is in understanding. They pray either standing or sitting, as the case may be.
At the end of the meeting they again kiss each other thrice as at the beginning, and then the brethren return home.
The virtue most highly respected among the Spirit-Wrestlers is mutual love. They have no personal property; but each regards his property as belonging to all. ”

“ It is such examples alone that will effectively promote international peace and universal disarmament, which are, in words at least, so generally desired, and the possibility of which is doubted by those only whose lives are founded upon that same general armament and violence, which render the perfect development of love and goodwill among men impossible. ”

“ The expression of sympathy is dear to the Spirit-Wrestlers, because, although they do not ask for help, they yet have no greater joy than to see the manifestation of love and pity to them on the part of others—of that same love for the sake of which these martyrs are sacrificing their lives. ”

“ Not only the parents, but every Spirit-Wrestler regards it as his duty to teach every child something useful whenever he has the opportunity to do so, and to keep him from evil whenever he has occasion. ”

“ Fasting they regard as a matter not of kind or quality of food, but of abstinence from gluttony and other vices, of purity, meekness and humility of the spirit. Mere outward abstinence from food does not, according to them, yield any good to the soul. ”

“ Apart from the question of the peculiarities of their religious faith, the Spirit- Wrestlers may be regarded as affording the model of well-organised family and social peasant life. In 1792, Kohovsky, the governor of Ekaterinoslaff, in his report to the higher authorities, said, amongst other things, that the Spirit- Wrestlers are of exemplarily good conduct, and, avoiding drunkenness and idleness, are continually occupied with the welfare of their homes, leading a moral life. ”

“ At the present moment there lies in the Moscow Prison Hospital a Spirit-Wrestler, one of the recalcitrant soldiers. He was in confinement about a year, and was deported with others to the Yakutsk district, but left behind at Moscow owing to illness. I have been to see him twice. He has consumption, and looks very bad, and will not long hold out against the fever, the perspirations, and the cough. In mind he is quite at rest, and says he is satisfied with everything, and only complains of his disease, though he bears even that with complete equanimity. ”

“ For a man to save his soul, they do not think it necessary for him to belong to their Society. They say that conduct brings a man salvation, and that for this it is only necessary to understand the way of God, and to follow it.
17. The Spirit-Wrestlers are careful as to the neatness of their houses, and say that for a Christian it is proper to live cleanly and tidily (in this they have always been distinguished from the other peasants in the same village) , and that it is only necessary to take care that the spirit be not set upon these things. ”

“ But as soon as question is raised as to principles and actions of theirs which in any way touch their religious faith, there is immediately disclosed a complete difference from, and even opposition to, other peasantry.
The Spirit-Wrestlers never frequent the churches; they do not worship images; during prayer they do not make the sign of the cross; they do not keep the ordinary fasts, and they take no part in the recreations and loose pleasures of worldly people. ”

“ The local authorities themselves, notwithstanding all the calumny they spread against these people, have more than once witnessed before the higher Government to the fact that the Spirit-Wrestlers give help and do acts of great charity to their fellow-men in need. They are compassionate even to household animals, and almost entirely refrain from killing them. ”

“ And we all know that before that highest tribunal, not human but divine, we have to answer, not for any digression from this or that official instruction, nor for the violation of the conventional demands of human public opinion, but for every deviation from the demands of the inner voice of God, which are known and comprehensible to ourselves alone—of that God from whom we have emanated and to whom we shall return when we leave this life. ”

“ Therefore no honest man, whatever his relation to the military service, can fail to regard, at all events with respect and compassion, these martyrs for conscience' sake, and desire, as far as it lies in his power, to alleviate their sufferings. ”

“ It was natural that such men could not have been left in peace, either by their neighbours or by the Government itself, the more so that no one knew or understood their spirit. From every side they suffered almost incessant persecution ”