90 IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE -XII 



pressed disgust at the whole system, saying, as well he 

 might, that it was utterly barbarous. He seemed de 

 spondent over it, and I tried to cheer him by showing how 

 the same custom of drinking strong liquors at funerals 

 had, only a few generations since, prevailed in large dis 

 tricts of England and America, but that better ideas of 

 living had swept it away. 



On our way through the street, we passed a shrine at 

 which a mob of peasants were adoring a sacred picture. 

 He dwelt on the fetishism involved in this, and said that 

 Jesus Christ would be infinitely surprised and pained 

 were he to return to earth and see what men were wor 

 shiping in his name. He added a story of a converted 

 pagan who, being asked how many gods he worshiped, 

 said : One, and I ate him this morning. At this I cited 

 Browning s lines put into the mouth of the bishop who 

 wished, from his tomb, 



&quot; To hear the blessed mutter of the mass, 

 And see God made and eaten all day long.&quot; 



I reminded him of his definition of religion given me 

 on one of our previous walks, and he repeated it, declaring 

 religion to be the feeling which man has regarding his 

 relation to the universe, including his fellow-men, and to 

 the power which governs all. 



The afternoon was closed with a visit to a Raskolnik, or 

 Old Believer, and of all our experiences this turned 

 out to be the most curious. The Raskolniks, or Old Be 

 lievers, compose that wide-spread sect which broke off 

 from the main body of the Russian Church when the pa 

 triarch of Moscow, Nikon, in the seventeenth century 

 attempted to remove various textual errors from the Bible 

 and ceremonial books. These books had been copied and 

 recopied during centuries until their condition had be 

 come monstrous. Through a mistake of some careless 

 transcriber, even the name of Jesus had been travestied 

 and had come to be spelled with two e s; the crudest ab- 



