“One afternoon,” writes this unfortunate mother, “I met in the street, coming out of a bathhouse, Rasputin, together with my two girls. One must be a mother to understand the feelings which overpowered me at this sight. I could find no words to say, but remained standing motionless and silent before them. The prophet turned to me and slowly said: ‘Now you may feel at peace, the day of salvation has dawned for your daughters!’” Another woman, who had also fallen under the spell of Rasputin, wrote as follows about him: “I left my parents, to whom I was tenderly attached, to follow the prophet. One day when we were travelling together in a reserved first-class carriage, talking about the salvation of souls and the means to become a true child of God, he suddenly got up, approached me, and * * * proceeded to cleanse me of all my sins. Towards evening I became anxious and asked him: ‘Perhaps what we have been doing to-day was a sin, Gregory Efimitsch?’ ‘No, my daughter,’ he replied, ‘it was not a sin. Our affections are a gift from God, which we may use as freely as we like.’” Bishop Feofane finally was obliged to recognise the evil which Rasputin was constantly doing, and he bitterly repented having been taken in by him and by his hypocrisy. He reproached himself especially for having given him a letter of recommendation to the famous Father John of Cronstadt, through whom Rasputin was to become acquainted with some of the people who were later on to pilot him in the society of St. Petersburg. The bishop was not a clever man by any means, but he had been sincere in his admiration for Rasputin, a fact which added to the consternation that overpowered him when the truth about the famous sectarian became known to him. He assembled a kind of judicial court, composed of one bishop, one monk and three well-known and highly respected civil functionaries, and called upon the prophet to come and explain himself before this court as to the actions which were imputed to him. Among these figured his general conduct in regard to the women who had enrolled themselves in the ranks of his disciples. But somehow the adventurer succeeded in dispelling the suspicions that had become attached to his name and conduct, and he explained in a more or less plausible manner the things which had been told about him. His leanings towards feminine society, and his invariable custom of bathing with women, he declared to be quite innocent things, and only a proof of his desire to show that it was quite possible for human beings to rise above every kind of carnal temptation.