AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY 351
mi^htj but in right/ ' Live till eve,, live for ever/ etc. — these legends and proverbs formed the spiritual food of the people.
Besides these, there were Christian customs : to have pity on a criminal or a wanderer, to give of one's last resources to a beggar, and to ask forgiveness of a man one has offended.
All this is now forgotten and discarded. It is now all replaced by learning by rote the Catechism, the triune composition of the Trinity, prayers before lessons, and prayers for teachers and for the Tsar, etc. So, within my recollection, the people have grown ever religiously coarser and more coarse.
One part — most of the women — remain as super- stitious as they were 600 years ago, but without that Christian spirit which formerly permeated their lives ; the other part, which knows tlie Catechism by heart, are absolute atheists. And all this is consciously brought about by the clergy.
'But that applies to Russia,* is what Western Europeans — Catholics and Protestants — will say. But I think that the same, if not worse, is happening in Catholicism, with its prohibition of the Gospels and its Notre-Dames ; and in Protestantism, with its holy idleness on the Sabbath day, and its bibliolatry — that is, its blind belief in the letter of the Bible. I think, in one form or another, it is the same throughout the quasi-Christian world.
In proof of this, it is sufficient to remember the age- old fraud of the flame that kindles in Jerusalem on the day of the Resurrection, and which no one of the Church people exposes ; or the faith in the Redemption, which is preached with peculiar energy in the very latest phases of Christian Protestantism.
But not only is the Church teaching harmful by its irrationality and immorality, it is specially harmful because people professing this teachi-ng, while living
