ave a secret magical power of averting evil in this world
and securing felicity in the next. To this general rule the Russian
peasantry are no exception, and the Russian Church has not done all it
might have done to eradicate this conception and to bring religion into
closer association with ordinary morality. Hence such incidents as the
following are still possible: A robber kills and rifles a traveller,
but he refrains from eating a piece of cooked meat which he finds in the
cart, because it happens to be a fast-day; a peasant prepares to rob a
young attache of the Austrian Embassy in St. Petersburg, and ultimately
kills his victim, but before going to the house he enters a church
and commends his undertaking to the protection of the saints; a
housebreaker, when in the act of robbing a church, finds it difficult to
extract the jewels from an Icon, and makes a vow that if a certain saint
assists him he will place a rouble's-worth of tapers before the saint's
image! These facts are within the memory of the present generation. I
knew the young attache, and saw him a few days before his death.

All these are of course extreme cases, but they illustrate a tendency
which in its milder forms is only too general amongst the Russian
people--the tendency to regard religion as a mass of ceremonies which
have a magical rather than a spiritual significance. The poor woman who
kneels at a religious procession in order that the Icon may be carried
over her head, and the rich merchant who invites the priests to bring
some famous Icon to his house, illustrates this tendency in a more
harmless form.

According to a popular saying, "As is the priest, so is the parish," and
the converse proposition is equally true--as is the parish, so is the
priest. The great majority of priests, like the great majority of men
in general, content themselves with simply striving to perform what is
expected of them, and their character is consequently determined to a
certain extent by the ideas and conceptions of their parishioners. This
will become more apparent if we contrast the Russian priest with the
Protestant pastor.

According to Protestant conceptions, the village pastor is a man of
grave demeanour and exemplary conduct, and possesses a certain amount
of education and refinement. He ought to expound weekly to his flock, in
simple, impressive words, the great truths of Christianity, and exhort
his hearers to walk in the paths of righteousness. B