"He is ordained?"
"You know that some of our brethren live in Turkey and in Austria, where the Turks and Germans grant them asylums which they have not always found at home. A good many Old Believers dwell in a village, called Belia Krinitza, in the country lying at the feet of the Carpathians, just beyond the frontiers of Podolia and Bessarabia. One Ambrosius, a Greek prelate from Bulgaria, visited these refugees, and consecrated their Bishop Cyril, who is still alive. Cyril consecrated Father Anton, our Moscow priest."
"Father Anton marries and christens the members of your church?"
"He does, in secret. In his worldly name he buys and sells, like any other dealer in his shop."
"You live in hope that the persecution will not come again?"
"We live to suffer, and not to yield."
Passing into the hospital, we find a hundred men, in one large edifice; four hundred women in a second large edifice. The rooms are very clean; the beds arranged in rows, the kitchens and baking houses bright. A woman stands at a desk, before a Virgin, and reads out passages from the gospels and the psalms. Each poor old creature drops a courtesy as we pass her bed, and after we have eaten of their bread and salt, in the common dining-hall, they gather in a line and cross themselves, bending to the ground, thanking us, as though we had conferred on them some special grace.
These asylums of the Old Believers are the only free charities in Russia; for the hospitals in towns are Government works, supported by the state. The Black Clergy does little for the poor, except to supply them with crops of saints, and bring down persecution on the Popular Church.
On driving back to Moscow, in the afternoon—pondering on what we have seen and heard—the lay singers, the clean asylum, and the sealed-up altar—we arrive under the Kremlin wall in time to find the mitred monk in our front again, just dashing with his splendid coach and six black horses through the Holy Gate!