Those who have watched the landing of a crowd of Russian pilgrims at Jaffa will realize the power which Nicholas had at his back in the execution of his policy of fighting for the Holy Shrines. I have seen the old people, men and women, the tears streaming from their poor tired eyes, fall down upon their knees, to kiss the soil, the treading of which was the reward of long lives of grinding labour, privation and parsimony. I have seen an old peasant, with matted hair and beard, meanly wrapped in a sheepskin robe, sobbing out his patient heart in an ecstasy of grief at the Holy Sepulchre. In order to save up the money for this pious errand they must stint themselves, they must almost starve themselves, laying up kopeck by kopeck, looking with surety for their reward in another, a better and a less grinding life. The Church has promised it, and God will fulfil the promises of His Church. Half a century and more has slipped away since I left Russia, and I should have great hesitation in writing down my impressions of the intensely religious character of the Russian people were it not that recent writings by well qualified observers show that those long years have wrought little change. Mr. Stephen Graham’s book, “The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary,” is a most charming and sympathetic study of the complex psychological question of the religion of the Russian. Indeed, the only fault with which it can be charged is that the writer is almost too enthusiastic—more Orthodox than the Patriarch. I call it a complex question because it is so difficult to say how far it is pure religion and how far it is only mysticism, but, be it religion or be it mysticism, it is deeply ingrained in the soul of the Russian mujik; it is part of himself, and is revealed in a veneration for which I have found no parallel elsewhere. But the strange part about it is its powerlessness for restraint from sin. The greatest criminal will obey the harassing prescriptions of his Church as though his very life depended upon it. In Lent he will submit to a fast which is nothing short of cruel even the Mohammedans’ fast in the month of Ramadan is nothing to it, for when sunset comes the pious Moslem is free to feast as he pleases. With streaming eyes, in a frenzy of religious rapture, the Orthodox peasant will adore the sacred shrines and cross himself before the ikon, the blessed picture of his patron saint. But that is all. Piety and virtue are two things. The old Budotchnik (night-watchman), who had his hut upon the frozen Neva, would cut a hole in the ice, into which he might throw the body of the wayfarer whom he had murdered, to be carried down to the Baltic; but in the Budotchka (his wooden hovel) a lamp always burned before the blessed ikon, in the presence of which he would count his unholy spoil. The toper, reeling with the fumes of vodka, before the days of that brave abstinence law of the present Tsar, would never be so