"Again the monks have won from me, Matvei. What is a monk? A man who wishes to hide from his fellow men his own vileness and who is afraid of its power over him. Or, perhaps, a man who is overcome by his weakness, and flees from the world in fear, that the world may not devour him. Such monks are the better and more interesting; but the others are only homeless men, dust of the earth, or still-born children."
"What are you among them?" I asked.
I might have asked this ten times or more straight to his face, but he answered me always in this way:
"Man is a child of accident on this earth, everywhere and forever."
His God, too, was a mystery to me. I tried to ask him about God when he was sober, but he only laughed and answered with some well-known quotation.
But God was higher to me than anything that was ever written about Him.
I asked him when he was drunk how he saw God then. But even drunk, Anthony was firm.
"Ah, you are cunning, Matvei," he answered. "Cunning and obstinate. I am sorry for you."
I, too, was sorry for him, for I saw his solitude and I valued the abundance of his thoughts, and I was sorry that they were being sown at random in his cell. But though I was sorry for him, still I persisted firmly in my questions, and once he said, unwillingly:
"I no more see God than you, Matvei."