At last the monk said that everybody attacked him and nobody stuck up for him, and he retired into another corner of the carriage, followed by the soldier, who went on with the argument, and afterwards repeated his main thesis to me separately, namely, that all priests were deceivers, because God is the same for everybody. Therefore there could be only one religious belief were it not for the lies of priests. But what struck me in this matter is a thing which has repeatedly struck me among Russians of the lower class, namely, their broad common sense in religious matters. “Mysticism,” Mr. Chesterton once wrote, “was with Carlyle as with all its genuine professors only a transcendent form of common sense. Mysticism and common sense alike consist in a sense of the dominance of certain truths which cannot be formally demonstrated.” Now the Russians of the lower class seem to me often the genuine professors of mysticism, because their mysticism is simply common sense. And it is this very fact which seems to me to lead people astray when they discuss the religion of the Russian peasant. For instance, you often hear people bewail the _superstition_ of the peasant which makes him devote so much attention to paper and wooden images. Again, I have read in an English book on the Russian peasant that the peasant’s habit of perpetually crossing himself, his respect for images, and his prayers are purely mechanical and therefore meaningless, because they are often interrupted by, or simultaneous with, jokes, laughter, and the business of life. Now this union of the practice of the outward signs of religion with the business of everyday life, this interruption of a prayer by a conversation, this sign of the cross made before a theft seem to me all to derive from the broad common sense which is at the root of their belief, and which, as Mr. Chesterton says, is synonymous with mysticism. Because if your belief in God is solid and based on great rocks of common sense it is not extraordinary that your outward expression of your allegiance to the great fact should be mechanical. For instance, if you are the loyal subject of the King, you mechanically take off your hat when he drives past you in the street or when you see the colours of his Army go by, and nobody says, if at that moment you happen to be whistling a comic song or thinking of the North Pole, that your action is hypocritical, insincere, or meaningless. But it is exactly the same in the case of the peasants; the outward expression of their religion is as mechanical as possible, but it is mechanical because their religious feeling is true and right and not because it is insincere and false.