He lost no time in beginning an argument with the priest as to the relations of their respective countries, and when it threatened to become acrimonious, the secretary, hoping to create a diversion, asked the priest why he did not encourage his parishioners to come to the Y. M. C. A. At that point I threw myself into the breach, and with considerable difficulty directed the conversation into safer channels. I asked the priest to show us his mission, and he took us into the church, much poorer than any I have ever seen in Russia, and then into the schoolroom, where the children of the miners received their religious instruction and as much of secular education as they craved. The teacher was a lean youth who looked as if he had suffered moral, spiritual and physical bankruptcy before coming to America. He and the whole equipment seemed hopelessly inadequate and out of place. The secretary did not know that hundreds of children were growing up in an American community, yet completely isolated from it, and the Herr Director remarked that in Germany this would be regarded as treason to the state. The priest declared that it was his mission in America not only to keep his people and their children loyal to the national church, but to inject into our Westernized materialism this true Slavic faith and its leaven. He believed that in America we lack soul. We worship science and money and business. The Russian alone lives in intimacy with God and regards that relation of the supremest importance. "The American," he continued, "believes in developing natural resources, the German develops the mind, the Russian alone develops the soul." I have always had the greatest reverence for the Russian Soul. I have learned something the Herr Director could not see, on account of the natural, political antagonism between his own country and Russia; something the secretary could not comprehend on account of his provincialism, and the priest would not admit because of his official position, namely: that neither the Russian State nor the Russian Church represents the Russian Soul. Its common people, although nearly crushed by the one and confused by the other, are still Christian souls and as such have a mission to America; but I could not see how that mission would be fulfilled by locking up a few hundred children in a filthy schoolroom and teaching them their national catechism. The Spiritual Russia, as it is incorporated in its common people and as it is interpreted by Tolstoy and Dostoyewsky, has reached us and taught us the greatest lesson which we self-righteous Americans needed to learn: the impossibility to judge our peers or to be judged by them.