Primitive mankind is everywhere and always disposed to regard religion as simply a mass of mysterious rites which have a secret magical power of averting evil in this world and securing felicity in the next.

To this general rule the Russian peasantry are no exception, and the Russian Church has not done all it might have done to eradicate this conception and to bring religion into closer association with ordinary morality.

Hence such incidents as the following are still possible: A robber kills and rifles a traveller, but he refrains from eating a piece of cooked meat which he finds in the cart, because it happens to be a fast-day; a peasant prepares to rob a young attache of the Austrian Embassy in St.Petersburg, and ultimately kills his victim, but before going to the house he enters a church and commends his undertaking to the protection of the saints; a housebreaker, when in the act of robbing a church, finds it difficult to extract the jewels from an Icon, and makes a vow that if a certain saint assists him he will place a rouble's-worth of tapers before the saint's image! These facts are within the memory of the present generation.

I knew the young attache, and saw him a few days before his death.
All these are of course extreme cases, but they illustrate a tendency which in its milder forms is only too general amongst the Russian people--the tendency to regard religion as a mass of ceremonies which have a magical rather than a spiritual significance.

The poor woman who kneels at a religious procession in order that the Icon may be carried over her head, and the rich merchant who invites the priests to bring some famous Icon to his house, illustrates this tendency in a more harmless form.
According to a popular saying, "As is the priest, so is the parish," and the converse proposition is equally true--as is the parish, so is the priest.