the Catholics and the Protestants of all denominations--what is
their practical work? and what are the results of their practical
work?

The practice of our Russian so-called Orthodox Church is plain to
all. It is an enormous fact which there is no possibility of
hiding and about which there can be no disputing.

What constitutes the practical work of this Russian Church, this
immense, intensely active institution, which consists of a
regiment of half a million men and costs the people tens of
millions of rubles?

The practical business of the Church consists in instilling by
every conceivable means into the mass of one hundred millions of
the Russian people those extinct relics of beliefs for which there
is nowadays no kind of justification, "in which scarcely anyone
now believes, and often not even those whose duty it is to diffuse
these false beliefs." To instill into the people the formulas of
Byzantine theology, of the Trinity, of the Mother of God, of
Sacraments, of Grace, and so on, extinct conceptions, foreign to
us, and having no kind of meaning for men of our times,
forms only one part of the work of the Russian Church. Another
part of its practice consists in the maintenance of idol-worship
in the most literal meaning of the word; in the veneration of holy
relics, and of ikons, the offering of sacrifices to them, and the
expectation of their answers to prayer. I am not going to speak
of what is preached and what is written by clergy of scientific or
liberal tendencies in the theological journals. I am going to
speak of what is actually done by the clergy through the wide