Irene reflected with some bitterness that only in Russia is the guardianship of religion left in the hands of grasping peasants. The very name of a seminarist is connected, in Russia, with the idea of coarseness. The education, the mental development of the priesthood is on the lowest level, and social life is entirely unknown to them. A youth who has barely finished his course at the seminary, is hurriedly ordained, and rushed off to some village in the depths of the country, where the sheep of his fold, rough, wild peasants, teach their young pastor to drink. Should he have the luck to be sent to a large town, his knowledge of life and of social ways and customs is so small that he can do no good whatever to his parishioners. On the contrary, he irritates them by clumsy tactlessness when hearing confessions, by wild sermons, and an unceremonious attitude towards the holiest things. He turns his church into a shop, where he sells ikons, candles, calendars, and countless other trifles, from which he tries to make as good an income as he can. Sick at heart, Irene remembered how priests at home, while holding out the cross to be kissed by worshippers before leaving church, continued mumbling a special service they were supposed to be celebrating after Mass in honour of some saint, standing the while with their backs to the ikon of the said saint, and hardly troubling to give the responses to the co-officiating deacon. She remembered also a scene witnessed at a service before a miracle-working ikon, in a provincial monastery, where the drunken priest and the equally drunken deacon had quarrelled and abused each other in the intervals between the prayers. Unhappily, indeed, such and similar occasions were none too rare, and they rankled in Irene’s mind, wounding her heart and shaking the foundations of her respect for Orthodoxy. Just before her departure from Russia, she had happened to be present at a little improvised religious meeting arranged at the house of a friend for a small group of schoolgirls of the higher social circles. They all arrived looking very excited and inspired, and their little youthful faces wore serious and attentive expressions. How much holiness and goodness could at such a moment have been sown in those innocent young souls by an enlightened pastor! And how did the Russian priest, invited to speak to these children, use the occasion? The serious, solemn old veteran mounted the platform and spoke for a whole hour about the advisability of eating during Lent, only the particular kind of butter prescribed for such periods, and the sinfulness of eating the ordinary kind! Irene had watched the faces of the listening girls, and had seen reflected on them surprise, uncertainty, and at last flushes of indignation. They had come for a piece of bread, and had been given a stone.