Page:Leskov - The Sentry and other Stories.djvu/207



ARLY one evening, during the Christmas holidays, we were sitting at tea in the large blue drawing-room of the episcopal palace. There were seven guests; the eighth was our host, a very aged archbishop, who was both sickly and infirm. All were highly educated men, and the conversation turned on the subject of our faith and our scepticism, of the preaching in our churches, and of the enlightening labours of our missionaries in the East. One of the guests, a certain captain B., of the Navy, who was a very kind-hearted man, but a great antagonist of the Russian clergy, maintained that our missionaries were quite unfit for their work, and was delighted that the government had now permitted foreign evangelical pastors to labour in the propagation of the Gospel. B. asserted his firm conviction that these preachers would have great success, not only among the Jews, but everywhere, and would prove, as surely as two and two make four, the incapacity of the Russian clergy for missionary work.