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Rh, all the single-hearted devotion, all the mysticism, of a belief in the supernatural. Significantly enough, amongst the four classic novelists, three—Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—have ultimately been converted from scepticism and atheism to Christianity, and the fourth—Turgenev—only continued to adhere to positivism because he continued to live an exile in Germany and France. The only great philosophical thinker Russia has produced—Vladimir Soloviov—may be properly called a Christian Plato, and it is equally significant that the revolutionary leader who hitherto has had the strongest influence over the masses has been a priest. I am therefore not inclined to admit with the extreme Radicals, that the Church has ceased to be a national force. I have had myself opportunities of observing tens of thousands of Russian pilgrims at Jerusalem and at the great national shrines of Kieff and of Moscow, and in no other country have I met with such simple, pathetic, unwavering faith.

The loyalty to the Church is all the more amazing because the Church, as a body, has done little to deserve it. From my own observation in many Slav countries, in Bulgaria, in Serbia, as well as in Russia, the Orthodox