My soul groaned, "No; that is not the right." The streams of sorrow flowed turbidly over the whole earth, and with unspeakable horror I saw that there was no room for God in this chaos which separated man from man. There was no room to manifest His strength, no spot to place His foot. Eaten up by the vipers of sorrow and fear, by malice and despair, by greed and shamelessness, all life was falling into ruin and man was being destroyed by discord and weakening isolation. I questioned: "Art Thou not truly, O Lord, but a dream of the soul of man, a hope created by despair in an hour of dark impotence?" I saw that each one had his own God, and that his God was neither more noble nor more beautiful than His worshipers. This revelation crushed me. It was not God that man sought, but the forgetfulness of sorrow. Misfortune torments man and drives him in all directions. He escapes from himself; he wishes to avoid action; he is afraid to work in harmony with life, and he seeks a quiet corner where he can hide himself. I did not find in man the holy feeling of seeking God nor a striving to rejoice in the Lord. I saw nothing but fear of life, a desire to overcome sorrow. My conscience cried out: "No; that is not the right!" It happened more than once that I met a man who seemed deep in serious thought and had a good, clean light in his eyes. If I met him once or twice, he was the same; but at the third or fourth meeting I would see that he was bad or drunk, and that he was no longer modest, but shameless, vulgar and blasphemed God, and I could not understand why the man was spoiled or what had broken him. All seemed blind to me, and to fall easily by the way-side. I seldom heard an exalted word. Too frequently men spoke strange words out of habit, not understanding the benefit nor the harm which was locked up in their thoughts. They gathered together the speeches of the pious monks or the prophecies of the hermits and the anchorites, and divided them among each other, like children playing with broken pieces of china. In fact, I did not see the man, but fragments of broken lives, dirty human dust, which swept over the earth and was blown by various winds onto the steps of churches. The people circled in vast numbers around the relics of the saints or the miracle-making ikons, or bathed in the holy streams, and sought only self-forgetfulness. The church processions were painful to me. Even as a child the miraculous ikons had lost their significance for me, and my life in the monastery had destroyed any vestige of respect that was left. At times I felt that man was a gigantic worm, crawling in the dust of the roads, and that men urged each other on by a force which I could not see, calling to each other, "Forward! Hurry!" And above them, forcing their heads to the ground, floated the ikon like a yellow bird, and it seemed to me that its weight was far too heavy for them.