“Hypnotised!” Bogatyreff repeated, and burst out laughing.  “You won’t have anything?  Well, just as you please,” and he wiped his moustaches with his napkin.  “Then you’ll go?  Eh?  If he does not do it, give the petition to me, and I shall hand it on to-morrow.”  Shouting these words, he rose, crossed himself just as naturally as he had wiped his mouth, and began buckling on his sword.

“And now good-bye; I must go.  We are both going out,” said Nekhludoff, and shaking Bogatyreff’s strong, broad hand, and with the sense of pleasure which the impression of something healthy and unconsciously fresh always gave him, Nekhludoff parted from Bogatyreff on the door-steps.

Though he expected no good result from his visit, still Nekhludoff, following Bogatyreff’s advice, went to see Toporoff, on whom the sectarians’ fate depended.

The position occupied by Toporoff, involving as it did an incongruity of purpose, could only be held by a dull man devoid of moral sensibility.  Toporoff possessed both these negative qualities.  The incongruity of the position he occupied was this.  It was his duty to keep up and to defend, by external measures, not excluding violence, that Church which, by its own declaration, was established by God Himself and could not be shaken by the gates of hell nor by anything human.  This divine and immutable God-established institution had to be sustained and defended by a human institution—­the Holy Synod, managed by Toporoff and his officials.  Toporoff did not see this contradiction, nor did he wish to see it, and he was therefore much concerned lest some Romish priest, some pastor, or some sectarian should destroy that Church which the gates of hell could not conquer.

Toporoff, like all those who are quite destitute of the fundamental religious feeling that recognises the equality and brotherhood of men, was fully convinced that the common people were creatures entirely different from himself, and that the people needed what he could very well do without, for at the bottom of his heart he believed in nothing, and found such a state very convenient and pleasant.  Yet he feared lest the people might also come to such a state, and looked upon it as his sacred duty, as he called it, to save the people therefrom.

A certain cookery book declares that some crabs like to be boiled alive.  In the same way he thought and spoke as if the people liked being kept in superstition; only he meant this in a literal sense, whereas the cookery book did not mean its words literally.

His feelings towards the religion he was keeping up were the same as those of the poultry-keeper towards the carrion he fed his fowls on.  Carrion was very disgusting, but the fowls liked it; therefore it was right to feed the fowls on carrion.  Of course all this worship of the images of the Iberian, Kasan and Smolensk Mothers of God was a gross superstition, but the people liked it and believed in it, and therefore the superstition must be kept up.