One of the greatest of Russia’s saints, held in repute higher than most, is St. Sergius. Many are the wonders and miracles that are recorded of him. Before he was born, when his mother received the sacrament his shouts of joy could be heard all over the church. At his birth he could recite the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer by heart. As wise as he was pious, in the early part of the fourteenth century, he drew to himself a great following, and was even an adviser of the famous Dmitri of the Don, whose victory over the Tartars in the expedition undertaken by his advice he announced to his monks on the day and at the hour of its occurrence. It was in the year 1330 that he founded his great monastery, the Troitzkaia Lavra (the Monastery of the Trinity), about forty miles from Moscow, and when, to the sorrow of all men, he died and was canonized, his own name was added to that of his foundation, it became known as the Troitzkaia Sergiefskaia Lavra, and the fame of St. Sergius was established for all time. The Monks of the Trinity played a great and a noble part in the history of their country, especially during the Polish war at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Frocked heroes they were, against whom all the craft, the valour and the money of their enemies were of no avail. The siege had to be raised; and when after three years the Russians rose against the Poles, who were in possession of Moscow, after a time of tribulation and misery untold, the monks joined the forces of Minin and Pojarski, and even sold their treasures to help in driving the hated Pole from Russian soil. Once more they were in vain besieged in 1615, and it was under the impregnable walls of the convent which had done such loyal service to Russia that the treaty of peace with Poland was signed. The designs of the Poles had been religious as well as political; had they prevailed, Russia would have fallen under the spiritual dominion of the Pope. So the monks were warring for very existence, and they fought stubbornly. Even Peter the Great, a scoffer by profession, expressed, and no doubt felt, a sincere veneration for St. Sergius. It was a picture of the Saint which was carried with him as his standard in all his battles, and sooth to say, Peter owed no small debt of gratitude to the brave monks. His early years were not very rosy. He was but ten years old when his eldest brother, Feodor, died childless, leaving the succession to Peter, to the prejudice of a witling elder brother, Ivan. Their sister Sophia made this the pretext for a revolution to which she excited the strelzi (literally “archers”), a sort of irregular soldiery, and with their help assumed the regency. In 1789 he felt himself strong enough to call upon her to resign.