their parents wept, regarding literature as a dangerous kind of sorcery.
On the other hand, the leaven was working from the first, and some good results were to be seen throughout the population as a whole even in early times. Polygamy was abolished. The virtues of hospitality and philanthropy were recognised. Vladimir Monomachus wrote to his son: "It is neither fasting, nor solitude, nor the monastic life that will procure you eternal life. It is beneficence. Never forget the poor. Nourish them. Do not bury your riches in the bosom of the earth. That is contrary to the precepts of Christianity. Serve as father to the orphans, judge to the widows. Put to death neither innocent nor guilty; for nothing is more sacred than the life and the soul of a Christian."
There grew up in Russia a curious parallel to the custom of clinical baptism in the earlier days of the Church in the Roman Empire, as in the case of the deathbed baptism of Constantine the Great. It became customary for Russian princes to take the tonsure in the article of death. The tsars would smooth their passage to paradise by dying as monks.
The only literature known in Russia during these early times was religious or ecclesiastical, consisting of the Bible, the Fathers—especially St. Basil and St. Chrysostom, and lives of the saints; but some philosophy and so-called science were introduced. The romance of Barlaam and Josaphat was popular in Russia, as elsewhere throughout Christendom, in the early Middle Ages.
