“‘Next morning I went out to walk about the town,’ Myshkin went on, as soon as Rogozhin was quiet again, though his lips still quivered with spasmodic convulsive laughter. ‘I saw a drunken soldier in a terribly disorderly state staggering about the wooden pavement. He came up to me. “Buy a silver cross, sir?” said he. “I’ll let you have it for twenty kopecks. It’s silver.” I saw in his hand a cross--he must have just taken it off--on a very dirty blue ribbon; but one could see at once it was only tin. It was a big one with eight corners, of a regular Byzantine pattern. I took out twenty kopecks and gave them to him, and at once put the cross round my neck; and I could see from his face how glad he was that he had cheated a stupid gentleman, and he went off immediately to drink what he had got for it, there was no doubt about that. At that time, brother, I was quite carried away by the rush of impressions that burst upon me in Russia; I had understood nothing about Russia before. I had grown up, as it were, inarticulate, and my memories of my country were somehow fantastic during those five years abroad. Well, I walked on, thinking, “Yes, I’ll put off judging that man who sold his Christ. God only knows what’s hidden in these weak drunken beasts.” An hour later, when I was going back to the hotel, I came upon a peasant woman with a tiny baby in her arms. She was quite a young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. The baby smiled at her for the first time in its life. “What are you doing, my dear?” (I was always asking questions in those days.) “God has just such gladness every time He sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.” That was what the woman said to me almost in those words, this deep, subtle, and truly religious thought--a thought in which all the essence of Christianity finds expression; that is the whole conception of God as our Father and of God’s gladness in man, like a father’s in his own child--the fundamental idea of Christ! A simple peasant woman! It’s true she was a mother ... and who knows, very likely that woman was the wife of that soldier. Listen, Parfyon! You asked me a question just now; here is my answer. The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanours. There is something else here, and there will always be something else--something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else. But the chief thing is that you will notice it more clearly and quickly in the Russian heart than anywhere else. And this is my conclusion. It’s one of the chief convictions I’ve gathered from our Russia. There is work to be done, Parfyon! There is work to be done in our Russian world, believe me.’”[48]