As I write these lines one question is very urgent in the minds of Englishmen, that of the disestablishment and partial disendowment of a church.  Once more the thirty pieces appear to be in the coffers of the church and they are attracting the curse.  There is only one way for that church; it is to give up to the spoiler not only that which is demanded of it but all the material wealth it possesses, its endowments, estates, houses, palaces, sacred edifices; to lay down everything and be simply, for the moment, a church in the hand of God.  As for disestablishment, the sooner Christians dissociate themselves from secular names and titles the better.  The Christian church is one established for ever, upon a rock, and those who compose that church are they who love their neighbour as a brother.

We have hope of new life, otherwise it were folly to write at all.  The great distress which the modern commercial life causes the individual soul is perhaps a blessing in disguise; it causes the individual to pause and think, causes him to rebel, to try and imagine a way to true salvation.  For, despite Progress and the benefit our posterity is supposed to be going to derive from it, it is an undisguisable fact that life, the wonderful and strange gift given to the individual perhaps once in an eternity, is being used without profit, without pause, without wonder.  We are like people who have lost their memories on the way to a feast, and our steps, in which is only dimly felt the remembrance of a purpose, take us nowhither.  We loiter in musty waiting-rooms, are frustrated by mobs, and foiled by an eternal clamour.  We have forgotten the feast and occupy ourselves in all manner of foolish and irrelevant ways.  Only now and again, struck by the absurdity of our occupations, we grope after our lost consciousness and feel somehow that somewhere out beyond is our real destination, that somewhere out there a feast is proceeding, that a cover is laid for us and dishes served, that though we are absent the master calls a toast to us and sends messengers to find us.

* * * * *

The somewhere-out-beyond has for me been Russia.  I do not suggest that it is Russia for every one.  There are many tables at the feast, and the messenger sent after the absent must tell of those who sit at his own table.  I think there is the same wine and the same fare at all tables.  I tell of the hospitality of Russia, the hospitality of mind and of hand found amongst a simple people.

In October 1911 I arrived as a pilgrim at the monastery of Novy Afon, or, to translate the Russian into more recognisable terms, New Athos, and I obtained the hospitality of the monks.

There are three sorts of monasteries in Russia, one where there is great store of gold and precious stones as in Troitsky Lavra near Moscow, another where there are ancient relics and ikons of miraculous power as at Solovetz, and a third where there is neither the distinction of gold nor of relics, where the power of the monks lies in their living actual work and prayer.  To the last-named category belongs Novy Afon.