TEMI

YAOUB DILAKOFF 223

or any other country where they may turn their educa-
tion to profitable account. It is hardly necessary to add
that the admirable training and education given in the
Fiske Seminary do not produce a like restlessness among
its " girl graduates." The girls marry at an early age,
make good housewives, and are in the main intelligent
and kindly Christians.

Possibly the education given in the Urmi College is
too high and too Western for the requirements of the
country and the probable future of the students. At all
events similar regrets were expressed in Urmi, as I after-
wards heard, regarding some of the American Mission
Colleges in Asia Minor. The missionaries say that the
directly religious results are not so apparent as could be
desired, that the young men are not ready to offer them-
selves in any numbers for evangelistic work, and that
the present tendency is to seek secular employment and
personal aggrandisement.

Though this secular tendency comes forward strongly
at this time, a number of evangelistic workers scattered
through Persia, Turkey, and Eussia1 owe their education

1 At the present time, when the persecution of the Stundists in Russia
is attracting considerable attention, it may interest my readers to hear
that one of the earliest promoters of the Stwidist movement was Yacub
Dilakoff, a Syrian, and a graduate of the Old American College. He went
to Russia thirty years ago, and was so horrified at the ignorance and gross
superstition of the peasantry that he studied Russian in the hope of en-
lightening them, and to aid his purpose became an itinerant hawker of
Bibles. The "common people heard him gladly," and among both the
Orthodox and the Lutherans prayer unions were formed, from which those
who frequented them received the name by which they are known, from
stunde, hour.

Dilakoff, whom the Stundists love to call "our Bishop,"has been
thrown into prison several times, but on his liberation began to teach
among the sect of the Molokans in the Crimea and on the Volga with such
success that sixteen congregations have been formed among them. His
zeal has since carried him to the Molokan colonies on th'e Amoor, where
he has been preaching and teaching for three years with such remarkable
results as to have received the title of* 'a Modern Apostle."