Christ preached His gospel to the peasant.  His is a peasant’s gospel, it seems to me, such a gospel as the peasants of Russia would take to themselves to-day if Jesus came preaching to them in the way He did to the common people of the Jews.  The cultured would disdain it, until a new St. Paul interpreted it for them in terms that they could understand, so giving it a “vogue”.  Both the peasants and the cultured would be Christians, but with this difference, that in one case the seed would be growing on the surface, and in the other from the depths.  The peasant, of course, has no surface; he is the good black earth all ready for the seed.

There is a way for the cultured:  it is to discover the peasant down beneath their culture, the original elemental soil down under the artificial surface, and to allow the sweetness and richness of that soil to give expression on that surface.  True culture is thus achieved; that which is not only on the surface but of the depths.

Thereby might every one discover not only the peasant but the pilgrim soul within; each man living on the world might realise himself as on the way to Jerusalem.  Such realisation would be the redemption of the present culture of the West.  For workers of every kind—­not only artists, musicians, novelists, but the handicraftsmen, the shapers of useful things, of churches and houses and laws, even the labourers in the road and the garden—­would be living in the strength of a promise and the light of a vision.

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The pilgrimage was a carrying of the cross, but it was also a happy wayfaring.  It was a hard journey but not comfortless.  Many of the pilgrims walked thousands of miles in Russia before finally embarking on the pilgrim boat.  They walked solitarily, not in great bands, and they were poor.  From village to village, from the Far North, Central Russia and the East, they tramped their way to Odessa and Batoum, and they depended all the way on other men’s hospitality.  As Jeremy said, “They had no money:  instead of which they found other men’s charity.”  They lived night by night in hundreds of peasant homes, and prayed day by day in hundreds of little churches.  Not only did they find their daily bread “for the love of God,” but in many cases they were furnished even to Jerusalem itself with passage money for the boat journey, and bread to keep the body alive.

Such pilgrims often were illiterate, and it was astonishing how they remembered all the folk they had to pray for at Jerusalem; for every poor peasant who could not leave his native village, but gave threepence or four-pence to the wanderer, asked to be remembered in the land “where God walked”.  Perhaps there were aids to remembrance.  Many people in the villages, wanting to be sure that their prayers and wants would be remembered, wrote their names on slips of paper and thrust them into the pilgrim’s hand.  Thus in the hostelry at Jerusalem an old wanderer came to me one morning with a sheaf of dirty papers on which were written names, and I read them out for him aloud, thus:—­