The shopman, with his hands tucked into his sleeves, smiled maliciously, and, encouraging the guardians of the ancient religion, cried, just like a small boy: "Th--a--at's right! Go it!" One day when the old men were quarreling, Petr Vassilitch slapped his comrade on the face with unexpected swiftness, put him to flight, and, wiping the sweat from his face, called after the fugitive: "Look out; that sin lies to your account! You led my hand into sin, you accursed one; you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" He was especially fond of reproaching his comrades in that they were wanting in firm faith, and predicting that they would fall away into "Protestantism." "That is what troubles you, Aleksasha--the sound of the cock crowing!" Protestantism worried and apparently frightened him, but to the question, "What is the doctrine of that sect?" he answered, not very intelligibly: "Protestantism is the most bitter heresy; it acknowledges reason alone, and denies God! Look at the Bible Christians, for example, who read nothing but the Bible, which came from a German, from Luther, of whom it was said: He was rightly called Luther, for if you make a verb of it, it runs: Lute bo, lubo luto![1] And all that comes from the west, from the heretics of that part of the world." Stamping his mutilated foot, he would say coldly and heavily: "Those are they whom the new Ritualists will have to drive out, whom they will have to watch,--yes, and burn too! But not us--we are of the true faith. Eastern, we are of the faith, the true, eastern, original Russian faith, and all the others are of the west, spoiled by free will! What good has ever come from the Germans, or the French? Look what they did in the year 12--." Carried away by his feelings, he forgot that it was a boy who stood before him, and with his strong hands he took hold of me by the belt, now drawing me to him, now pushing me away, as he spoke beautifully, emotionally, hotly, and youthfully: "The mind of man wanders in the forest of its own thoughts. Like a fierce wolf it wanders, the devil's assistant, putting the soul of man, the gift of God, on the rack! What have they imagined, these servants of the devil? The Bogomuili,[2] through whom Protestantism came, taught thus: Satan, they say, is the son of God, the elder brother of Jesus Christ, That is what they have come to! They taught people also not to obey their superiors, not to work, to abandon wife and children; a man needs nothing, no property whatever in his life; let him live as he chooses, and the devil shows him how. That Aleksasha has turned up here again." [Footnote 1: From Lutui which means hard, violent.] [Footnote 2: Another sect of Old Believers.] At this moment the shopman set me to do some work, and I left the old man alone in the gallery, but he went on talking to space: "O soul without wings! O blind-born kitten, whither shall I run to get away from you?"