76 IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE-XII 



a scandalous way, teaching them to abjure God and 

 curse the Czar ; that their father had thought it his duty 

 to give all his property away and work as a laborer ; that 

 therefore she the grandmother had secured an order 

 from the Emperor empowering her to take charge of the 

 children; that I had seen the children at their grand 

 mother s house, and that they had seemed very happy. 

 Tolstoi insisted that this statement by the grandmother 

 was simply made to cover the fact that the children were 

 taken from the mother because her belief was not of the 

 orthodox pattern. My opinion is that Tolstoi was mis 

 taken, at least as to the father ; and that the father had been 

 led to give away his property and work with his hands in 

 obedience to the ideas so eloquently advocated by Tolstoi 

 himself. Unlike his master, this gentleman appears not 

 to have had the advantage of a wife who mitigated his 

 ideas. 



Tolstoi also referred to the difficulties which trans 

 lators had found in securing publishers for his most re 

 cent book &quot; The Kingdom of God.&quot; On my assuring 

 him that American publishers of high standing would 

 certainly be glad to take it, he said that he had supposed 

 the ideas in it so contrary to opinions dominant in Amer 

 ica as to prevent its publication there. 



Eeturning to the subject of religion in Russia, he re 

 ferred to some curious incongruities ; as, for example, the 

 portrait of Socrates forming part of a religious picture 

 in the Annunciation Church at the Kremlin. He said that 

 evidently some monk, who had dipped into Plato, had 

 thus placed Socrates among the precursors of Christ. I 

 cited the reason assigned by Melanchthon for Christ s de 

 scent into hell namely, the desire of the Redeemer to 

 make himself known to Socrates, Plato, and the best of 

 the ancient philosophers; and I compared this with Lu 

 ther s idea, so characteristic of him, that Christ descended 

 into hell in order to have a hand-to-hand grapple and 

 wrestle with Satan. This led Tolstoi to give me a Rus 

 sian legend of the descent into hell, which was that, when 



