Page:Leskov - The Sentry and other Stories.djvu/331

 Rh understand Him and do not want His name to be blasphemed by the heathen. So I lived on, not showing tyranny with the same readiness as before, but patiently, one may almost say, lazily, stumbling under the crosses sent down to me both by Christ and not by Christ, of which the most remarkable one was that I, who began to study Buddhism with zeal, was sedulously reported by my Zyryan to be myself secretly a Buddhist. And this reputation clung to me, although I did not restrain the zeal of my Zyryan and allowed him to act according to the well tested and successful methods of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky, which were thus proclaimed over his grave by his follower Kus'ma: "If a heathen comes, order him to be taken to the sacristy—let him look upon our true Christianity. And I allowed the Zyryan to take anybody he chose to the sacristy and display to them with care all that our people and he had collected there of "true Christianity." All this was good and fairly efficacious: they praised our "true Christianity," but no doubt my Zyryan found it was dull to baptize only two or three at a time—and it certainly was "dull." Here we have a real Russian expression. Yes, gentlemen, it was dull then to struggle against the self-satisfied ignorance that tolerated the Faith only as a political means. But now, perhaps,