The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary

One Sunday I went to the convent of St. Martha and St. Mary in the Bolshaya Ordinka on the other side of the Moscow river. It is a wonderful institution, belonging to the new Ru...

But the _Filioque_ clause of the Creed is alone sufficient to exemplify the confusion of ecclesiasticism and the living Church. There are many who think that the two Churches of...

Velikanof told an amusing story of two peasants and a steam-engine. One of them held that it was an unclean spirit that made the engine go foward; the other said it was just ste...

The quotation “Martha, Martha, thou art cumbered about with many things: but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her” is...

When we arrived at the monastery in the holy wood we were accommodated in a cell, and a novice brought in the samovar at once. No passports were required, no charge was made. We...

The father, however, cut short Katia’s pocket-money and cut short his wife’s housekeeping money, and made coarse jokes at the expense of the house-hold. Though Katia was twenty-...

Between the Nile and the Red Sea lay the desert of the Thebaid, and the remote monastery of St. Anthony is now reached after two days’ camel ride from the station Beni Suef. The...

Through Libava pass the greater number of those who are going to America. Every ten days the Russo-Asiatsky Lloyd embarks a thousand or two thousand emigrants, every week vessel...

“More careful, people! Don’t fall down the hole. Once the Governor of Archangel fell down there; he didn’t get hurt because he fell on a chambermaid who was passing. Once an off...

Not that any great number of the Russian peasant soldiers ask themselves questions about the ethics of war. They go forward gladly to fight for the Tsar, and to defend their cou...

There is much of the Gospel written by men who had not the vision, or by politic priests. Many ecclesiastics of the early Church could not understand the mystic story, and misun...

Nietzsche wrote of religion disparagingly as an intoxicant, and yet by his own religion he was intoxicated. No one ever acted more strangely or became more excited under the inf...

What a divine disorder! The peasants seem to have an instinctive sense for grouping. No matter how much the crowd moves or how many changes are evolved in it, it is always a bea...

Winter changing to summer I gave up life in towns and set off upon a new adventure. In May I was looking at Bokhara and the gay-coloured meditative Mohammedan world. In June I w...

I look at the mummies of Egypt, at the bright pictures of the people, fresh as if painted yesterday. These paintings on the coffin-lids live, they are the real people. You know...

No prejudice against impossibilities; a cheerful acceptance of miracles, infractions of the “laws of Nature,” of the significance of dreams and visions, of the design of destiny...

“When ye fast, be not of a sad countenance”: the West, except in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, does not fast. The Roman Catholic Church, though Western in its locality...