So, I pass by twenty whole years… Life has thrust me into the very center of various currents, thrown me into Petersburg. I was called here, by the way, to fight neo-Christianity, i.e. Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, and others. I had to defend the Church, its truth (not the vital, earthly truth, which I did not remember at that time, but the dogmatic, philosophical truth). And I did it sincerely and without lies, because the center of my faith, the only chance in life was (and is) the image of Christ, crucified for the world of God… I spoke and wrote hastily and greedily, hurrying to shout: “Wait to condemn our truth, you do not know it. Come closer…”

I probably sometimes succeeded in defending my truth: I devoted my brain and soul to its defense. But I myself always remained internally defeated by my audience, even when it was silent. They would throw out an accusation in passing, and you wouldn’t get rid of it for days and weeks.

“You are lying,” they write from Saratov in the name of an entire party in a lithographed leaflet, “you are not defending Christ, but order. It is impossible to live in your Church with your Christianity. How many slavish lies: the persecution of sectarians and freedom of faith in general by the Church, the Church’s approval of war, even more so of executions, the approval of every available 'fact,' even serfdom, because it is a fact; available national and public morality — again because it exists, because it is a fact… We see that the Church is an instrument in the service of the 'available,' whereas its job is to judge from the heights of 'eternity,' from the heights of the Gospel… And we cannot accept it… you… your Christ. Is it not for this that your repainted, renewed dogmatic truth has been brought forward, in order to lull, to make us forget about the untruth of life and about the fact that you are silent and dare not speak about it. You want to hypnotize us with dogma…”

“Leave it alone,” writes the naive, semi-literate, but intelligent and not shy in words merchant S-v from Samara (famous for his open letter to Metropolitan Anthony), “you are like a clerk… You praise your Church like goods that you are selling. And who knows you, maybe you really do not see that the goods are sodden, and most importantly, you do not see that they bear the seal of the Antichrist… Faith is faith, and you talk well about it, but look — it is needed, this faith, to appoint God as a guardian of the property of the rich. You have given everything of God to Caesar to serve, turned God into a guard, rebuilt the Gospel so that it, like the 'Code of Punishments', threatens only slaves who do not obey their masters, and consoles the robbed: be patient, 'there' you will receive tenfold.”

I felt that there was an awful lot of truth in this. How could I deny it when Irenaeus Orlovsky argued in his sermon that the poor were needed to make the picture of life more aesthetically rich. Not all flowers in the meadow are red, we need blue and dark blue ones too. Not everyone is well-fed and rich — it is ugly and meager, and will get boring (obviously, for the well-fed).