sky, it will be this wonderful emotional power. The political changes,
the Trans-Siberian railway, their industrial and agricultural
progress,--all these are as nothing compared with the immense advance
that Christian sympathy is now making in the hearts of the Russian
people. The books of Dostoevski and Tolstoi point directly to the
Gospel, and although Russia is theoretically a Christian nation, no
country needs real Christianity more than she. The tyranny of the
bureaucracy, the corruption of fashionable society, the sufferings of
the humble classes, the hollow formalism of the Church, make Russia
particularly ripe for the true Gospel--just as true to-day as when
given to the world in Palestine. Sixty years ago Gogol wrote: "What is
it that is most truly Russian? What is the main characteristic of our
Russian nature, that we now try to develop by making it reject
everything strange and foreign to it? The value of the Russian nature
consists in this--that it is capable, more than any other, of
receiving the noble word of the Gospel, which leads man toward
perfection." One cannot read Dostoevski and Tolstoi without thinking
of the truth of Gogol's declaration.

All the philosophy and wisdom of the world have never improved on the
teachings of the Founder of Christianity. What the individual and
society need to-day is not Socialism, Communism, or Nihilism; no
temporary palliative sought in political, social, or financial Reform;
what we each need is a closer personal contact with the simple truths
of the New Testament. The last word on all political, philosophical,
and social questions may still be found in the Sermon on the Mount. It
is a significant fact, that Tolstoi, after a varied and long
experience of human life, after reviewing all the systems of thought
that have influenced modern society, should have finally arrived and
found rest in the statements that most of us learned in childhood from