Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 1, 1851).djvu/273

 pen in the great fast of Lent, they eat fish on that day. But the monks have many more severe and trying fasts imposed upon them, for they are obliged to content themselves with an acid drink, called kwas, and water mixed with yeast. The priests also are prohibited the use of warm water and beer at that time, although now all the laws and statutes are becoming lax and are abused. Moreover, besides the time of fasting, they eat meat on the Sabbath, but abstain on Wednesday. The teachers whom they follow are Basil the Great, Gregory, and John Chrysostom, whom they call Slatousta, i.e., golden mouth. They have no preachers. They think it enough to have been present at the service, and to have heard the words of the Gospel, the Epistles, and other teachers, which the priest recites in the vernacular. For this purpose, as they think that they avoid various opinions and heresies which often arise out of sermons, the festivals of the following week are announced on the Lord's Day, and they repeat the public confession. Moreover, whatever they see that the prince himself thinks and believes, that they set down to be right, and to be followed in all things.

I heard at Moscow that the patriarch of Constantinople, at the request of the prince of Russia himself, sent a certain monk named Maximilian to reduce judiciously into order all the books and canons, and all the statutes appertaining to the faith; and when he had done so, and when having corrected many most serious errors, he pronounced in the presence of the prince, that he who did not follow the Roman or Greek ritual, was evidently a schismatic when, I say, he said this, not long after (although the prince treated him with the greatest kindness) he is said to have disappeared, and many think he was drowned. It was in the third year of my residence at Moscow that one Marcus, a Greek merchant from Caffa, was reported to have said this, and he also was seized (although the Turkish