Russia is considered a country where speech is not free, and, indeed, listening to such meetings as ours there are often plain-clothes detectives. But the police could no more stop the mouths of the Russian people or the current of popular opinion than they could drain or hide the water of the ocean. In the monastery hostelry, in the third-class waiting-rooms, in third-class carriages, in the muddy and crowded market-square, in the tavern, the Russian is always to be found eagerly asking, seeking, informing, emphasising, making points of exclamation. All priests, policemen, post office officials, schoolmasters, squires, commercial travellers, and Russian-speaking foreigners will bear witness to how they have been pestered with simple Russians asking for an explanation of passages in the Bible, or asking questions about God. So Russia shows herself alive. Even the taverns, in which there is so much drunkenness and debauch, the Russians have made into something like free churches or open debating societies. Footnote 4: Since the War vodka has of course disappeared. Footnote 5: From _Gambrinus_, Kuprin’s Works, vol. iv. VII IN THE CHURCH I have been much struck with the many ruins of abbeys in England. There are many ruined abbeys that seem to need comparatively little restoration to make them great places of worship. Kirkstall Abbey outside Leeds, for instance, is a grand pile of stone, and has room for 1200 worshippers—but it remains little more than a curiosity and a questionable adornment of industrial Leeds. In Russia there are no such ruins. Throughout the wide stretch of Russia there is not a single Christian ruin. Christianity does not tolerate ruins. Kirkstall would never have been allowed to fall out of Christian service unless a heathen power like Turkey had gained possession of it. Russia, for instance, in 1875, coming into possession of the ruins of early Christian churches on the newly-acquired Caucasian shore of the Black Sea, at once set to work to restore them and to build new churches on the old holy sites. Kirkstall was built in 1152; it struck me, looking at it, that at their best the Russians of to-day are not unlike the English Christians of that date. They have the characteristics of early Christian fervour.