ays
hard, and, indeed, the greater the zeal the easier it seems. You
are only hungry on the first days of the fast, and then you get
used to it; it goes on getting easier, and by the end of a week you
don't mind it at all, and there is a numb feeling in your legs as
though you were not on earth, but in the clouds. And, besides that,
I laid all sorts of penances on myself; I used to get up in the
night and pray, bowing down to the ground, used to drag heavy stones
from place to place, used to go out barefoot in the snow, and I
even wore chains, too. Only, as time went on, you know, I was
confessing one day to the priest and suddenly this reflection
occurred to me: why, this priest, I thought, is married, he eats
meat and smokes tobacco--how can he confess me, and what power
has he to absolve my sins if he is more sinful that I? I even scruple
to eat Lenten oil, while he eats sturgeon, I dare say. I went to
another priest, and he, as ill luck would have it, was a fat fleshy
man, in a silk cassock; he rustled like a lady, and he smelt of
tobacco too. I went to fast and confess in the monastery, and my
heart was not at ease even there; I kept fancying the monks were
not living according to their rules. And after that I could not
find a service to my mind: in one place they read the service too
fast, in another they sang the wrong prayer, in a third the sacristan
stammered. Sometimes, the Lord forgive me a sinner, I would stand
in church and my heart would throb with anger. How could one pray,
feeling like that? And I fancied that the people in the church did
not cross themselves properly, did not listen properly; wherever I
looked it seemed to me that they were all drunkards, that they broke
the fast, smoked, lived loose lives and played cards. I was the
only one who lived according to the commandments. The wily spirit
did not slumber; it got worse as it went on. I gave up singing in
the choir and I did not go to church at all; since my notion was
that I was a righteous man and that the church did not suit me owing
to its imperfections--that is, indeed, like a fallen angel, I was
puffed up in my pride beyond all belief. After this I began attempting
to make a church for myself. I hired from a deaf woman a tiny little
room, a long way out of town near the cemetery, and made a prayer-room
like my cousin's, only I had big church candlesticks, too, and a
real censer. In this prayer-room of mine I kept the rules of holy
Mount A