Another will say it is the religion that helps you to face suffering, and point to Tolstoy’s story of the death of Ivan Ilyitch. Ivan Ilyitch was a man who had no religion, and had never faced suffering in his life, an ordinary bourgeois of the type of lower intelligentsia, jovial, selfish, cynical, fond of cards and of his dinner, and having no other particular interest in life except an ambition to make more money. Suddenly he is stricken with cancer, and lives for years in increasing pain till at last he dies in agony. He has no spiritual comfort; pain quite o’ercrows his spirit. The truth is, no pain really conquers the spirit, the spirit always triumphs at the last, even if the body is rendered useless by the struggle. But this truth is lost in the irreligion of Ivan Ilyitch. It would seem it would have been better if he had lived a more regular and healthy life in his youth, but that is a false moral. The fact is he had never faced the solemn mystery of life, never taken his ordinary human share in suffering, and so was lost in the hour of pain. But perhaps there were more spiritual gleams in the end of Ivan Ilyitch than Tolstoy tells us of. Tolstoy was a moralist. But in any case Ivan Ilyitch presents a contrast to a religious Russian on his death-bed, in his last agony, gripping tight in his hand a little wooden cross, his eyes upon the ikon of his patron saint before which the candle is burning. Another will say, the religion of suffering is that which helps you to face life, which is perhaps another way of saying that it is the religion which helps you to face death ... the religion which prompts you to take risks and will face no dangers. He is losing his soul. In a great war he wakens up and offers himself—and saves his soul. Or in the ordinary course of things, in the “weak piping times of peace,” he resolves to make a leap in the dark and get life, he gives up the old for the new—he saves his soul, and out of his sufferings springs a glory. Still it is not for every one to make this leap in the dark. Villagers, the peasants of a countryside, have obviously no call that way, or seldom a call that way. They have not the need that the townsman has, they have satisfying visions of truth, from nature, in their way of life, in their traditional customs. _Brand_ was probably wrong trying to lead his village flock up among the glaciers and avalanches to make a church of ice. He should have preached such sermons and made such appeals in towns. He would have led people from the towns. Nevertheless there has been a cult of _Brand_ in Russia, especially since Ibsen’s long drama was produced at the Theatre of Art, and many divinity students and young priests have been touched by his vigorous onslaught on the quiet lives of simple folk.