Page:Leskov - The Sentry and other Stories.djvu/225



HEN I became acquainted with all the accounts of the missionaries work, I was even more dissatisfied with their activity than I was with the work of my diocesan clergy; the converts to Christianity were extraordinarily few, and it was clear that the greater number of these were only paper converts. In reality most of those converted to Christianity had returned to their former faith—Lamaism or Shamanism, while others formed from all these faiths the strangest and most absurd mixture: they prayed to Christ and His Apostles; to Buddha and his Bodhisattvas; to warm boots, and felt bags containing Shamanistic charms. This double faith was not only practised by the nomad tribes, but was to be found almost everywhere in my flock, which was composed not of any single branch of one nationality but of scraps and fragments of different tribes. God only knows from whence and how they had been brought together. They were poor of speech and still poorer of understanding and imagination. Seeing that everything