It is very likely that the immense wealth of the other monasteries may invite the hand of the spoiler.  Even now the monks are notorious for drunkenness and corruptibility:  the institutions are moribund, and there is no doubt that if revolution had overturned the Tsardom the rich monasteries like the Troitsky would have been sacked.  Perhaps even Novy Afon and many another spiritual mother would have shared a common fate with their depraved sisters.  That is as may be.  The Revolution did not succeed and could not, because the common peasantry still prayed in the temples which the Revolutionaries would have destroyed.  The living church of Russia required its buildings even though the caretakers of these buildings were in some cases false stewards.

But there is no question of false stewards at Novy Afon.  It is a place where a Luther might serve and feel no discontent, a place of new life.  It looks into the future with eyes that see visions, and stretches forward to that future with hands that are creative; an institution with no past but only a present and an idea, not acting by precedent or tradition but taking its inspiration straight from life’s sources.

II

It will be profitable to describe the monastery just as I saw it and felt it to be, on the occasion of my arrival there after five hundred miles tramping in the autumn of 1911.  I had overtaken many pilgrims journeying thither, and the nearer I approached the more became their numbers.  There were many on foot and many in carts and coaches.  Multi-coloured diligences were packed with people and luggage—­the people often more miscellaneously packed than the luggage, clinging on behind, squashed in the middle, sprawling on the top.  The drivers looked superb though dressed in thousand-times-mended black coats, the post-boys tootled on their horns, and the passengers sang or shouted to the music of accordions.  Of course not all those in the coaches were pilgrims religiously inclined; many were holiday seekers out for the day.  The gates of Novy Afon are open to all, even to the Mahometan or the Pagan.  It was a beautiful cloudless morning when I arrived at this most wonderful monastery in the Russian world—­a cluster of white churches on a hill, a swarm of factories and workshops, cedar avenues, orchards, vineyards, and, above all, tree-covered mountains crowned by grey towers and ancient ruins, the whole looking out on the far sea.

At the monastery gates were a cluster of empty coaches waiting for passengers, the drivers sitting in the dusty roadway meanwhile, playing cards or eating chunks of red melon.  Pilgrims with great bundles on their backs stood staring vacantly at the walls or at the sea; monks in long grey cloaks, square hats, and long hair, passed in and out like bees about a hive, and from a distance came a musical drone, the chanting of church services.