Father Michael was sent for, and immediately fell into a hot dispute with Smokovnikov.

“A stupid woman first falsely accused my son, then retracts her accusation, and you of course could not hit on anything more sensible to do than to slander an honest and truthful boy!”

“I did not slander him, and I must beg you not to address me in such a way.  You forget what is due to my cloth.”

“Your cloth is of no consequence to me.”

“Your perversity in matters of religion is known to everybody in the town!” replied Father Michael; and he was so transported with anger that his long thin head quivered.

“Gentlemen!  Father Michael!” exclaimed the director of the school, trying to appease their wrath.  But they did not listen to him.

“It is my duty as a priest to look after the religious and moral education of our pupils.”

“Oh, cease your pretence to be religious!  Oh, stop all this humbug of religion!  As if I did not know that you believe neither in God nor Devil.”

“I consider it beneath my dignity to talk to a man like you,” said Father Michael, very much hurt by Smokovnikov’s last words, the more so because he knew they were true.

Michael Vedensky carried on his studies in the academy for priests, and that is why, for a long time past, he ceased to believe in what he confessed to be his creed and in what he preached from the pulpit; he only knew that men ought to force themselves to believe in what he tried to make himself believe.

Smokovnikov was not shocked by Father Michael’s conduct; he only thought it illustrative of the influence the Church was beginning to exercise on society, and he told all his friends how his son had been insulted by the priest.

Seeing not only young minds, but also the elder generation, contaminated by atheistic tendencies, Father Michael became more and more convinced of the necessity of fighting those tendencies.  The more he condemned the unbelief of Smokovnikov, and those like him, the more confident he grew in the firmness of his own faith, and the less he felt the need of making sure of it, or of bringing his life into harmony with it.  His faith, acknowledged as such by all the world around him, became Father Michael’s very best weapon with which to fight those who denied it.

The thoughts aroused in him by his conflict with Smokovnikov, together with the annoyance of being blamed by his chiefs in the school, made him carry out the purpose he had entertained ever since his wife’s death—­of taking monastic orders, and of following the course carried out by some of his fellow-pupils in the academy.  One of them was already a bishop, another an archimandrite and on the way to become a bishop.

At the end of the term Michael Vedensky gave up his post in the school, took orders under the name of Missael, and very soon got a post as rector in a seminary in a town on the river Volga.