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Do not spare anything for your brother’s womb, as for your own womb: sparing a brother means falling away from God and joining with the enemy, for sparing food is enmity against a brother. So that I do not become proud of my present position, I must remember what I was by birth, rank, poverty, and especially by my sins, and what I became by the sole grace of God. Imagine all the abomination, absurdity, all the destruction, all the devastating consequences of sin in you and in various people, for example, in money-lovers, adulterers, spendthrifts, murderers, envious people, feuders, drunkards, gluttons, hypocrites and others - and hate it with complete hatred, and cleave to the opposite virtues with complete love. Change your heart, renew your heart. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation [2 Cor. 5, 17]. Grant me, Lord, always goodwill towards my neighbor, especially towards my family, against whom I have more reasons to be at enmity, albeit unfairly. Grant me the grace to consider myself worse and more guilty than everyone else, and to be forgiving to everyone, to consider myself obligated to them, and not them to me, and not to be angry with my family because they seem to be very obliged to me or as if they rob and offend me: may this thought always be far from me. Not a single iota of lies should be allowed into our immaculate faith, brought from heaven by the Son of God: for just let the devil, the father of lies, launch even a partial thorn, he will little by little teach you to pervert the second, and the third, and the tenth, in a word - many things, and faith will no longer be true and saving. Do not take to heart any troubles or injustices of your neighbors towards you, but endure everything with meekness and kindness and, seeing, do not notice, but hand over all the untruths of your neighbor to the One who judges righteously, for the earth is full of unrighteousness; but do the truth yourself. How conveniently every sin takes possession of me: malice, rancor, gloating, insensibility towards one’s neighbor in his illness, poverty, misfortune, temptation, fornication of all kinds, covetousness, gluttony, despondency, laziness and other sins! The slightest temptation and I seethe with passion. I should be not a priest, but a swineherd. Father Archpriest wrote one word, apparently offensive, in the mailing book, calling Father Matthew and me nosy or covetous (interested) - and I was embarrassed, embittered, resisted at first, although later I changed my mind and went. I forgot the words of the apostle: love... is not irritated, does not think evil [1 Cor. 13:4–5], and the words of the Lord Himself: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who use you and persecute you [Matt. 5, 44 ]; forgot the general human weakness and sinfulness, the inclination towards evil, the instigations of the devil, and became embittered at the one created in the image of God, at the servant of God and his fellow servant. The love for my neighbor, which endures everything, has dried up in me - it has dried up for the sake of the increase in my iniquities: pride, gluttony, fornication, love of money, ambition, vanity and other sins. Damn man I am! I was completely captured from the enemy at the unction of Timofey Petrovich Sidorov, completely filled with sins, completely dead spiritually. The brothers all calmly, with faith, reverence, and love performed prayers, singing, rituals, and I - vaguely and hesitatingly. Woe to me, a sinner! Due to the multitude of my sins, I did not dare to look everyone straight in the eyes, but, with my eyes downcast, I stood like a criminal. Oh, how sins captivate me, how crazy they make me! Grant me, Lord, to transform myself according to Your Gospel, to renew myself. Who should I be angry with? On his old man, on the devil and on sin, which he sows, grows, spreads and strengthens in everyone, and with which he tries to destroy everyone. I thank you, Lord, for you brought this temptation upon me and showed me in its true form the face of my soul - ugly, nasty. Fix my heart. Give me Your light during times of temptation, that I may keep Your commandments. What is the disease of my heart, that I am dissatisfied with everyone and am upset with everyone, who is in my house? Eating as much bread as your heart desires is, I consider, a permissible thing to do during Lent, and yet the Lord, according to humanity, did not eat bread or drink water during the entire period of Lent, and many of the pious Christians do not eat or drink on Wednesdays and Fridays, or even for a whole week. O I, glutton! The devil tempts 10 and frightens me where there is no temptation or fear, and how viciously, importunately, persistently! My God! How vile, absurd and evil is sin! How not to feel sorry for people who sin! But some are intoxicated by the sweetness of sin and do not fight it. Therefore, I envied the foolish, seeing the prosperity of the wicked like me [Ps. 72, 3]. Do not take revenge on your neighbor for any evil in word, deed, thought, or feeling, but leave judgment to God, who knows everything and rewards everything, as you know not only from the Scriptures, but also from your own experience. Do not be indignant at any evil, for confusion is also a sin: it shows inner corruption. Sin eats everyone in a terrible way, disfigures, kills: fight with all measures against all sin, in all forms, when it is sweet and when it is bitter, when it comforts the flesh and when it saddens, when it encourages and when it frightens, for in all cases it kills the soul, disfigures it, deprives it of communion with God. When a boss accuses me of something or reproaches me, I always bitterly try to justify myself, imagining myself to be right and getting irritated at the accuser; but this is bad and shows the pride, hypocrisy, and pride hidden in me. We must endure everything for the sake of the Lord, who has endured all unrighteousness, and not speak against it, but strictly examine our sins to see if I really have what I am accused of. They say: what is the importance that Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruit; and they even speak blasphemously to the Creator: why did He give such a commandment, or that such a commandment is unworthy of the all-good Creator. How is not important! The Creator’s commandment is always important, and the creature has no right to say that it is not important: with the Source of wisdom and reason everything is wise, with the Good everything is for good. But was it not because of eating the forbidden fruit that man fell into gluttony, self-love and addiction to earthly things, so that everything earthly - the flesh and addiction to things - began to take precedence over the spirit; Was it not because of eating the forbidden fruit that man, created in the image and likeness of God, transformed the order of the Creator? Is it not because of an addiction to the belly, to food, to drink and to earthly things in general that man constantly violates the entire law of God, the blessed commandments of God - about love for God and neighbor? Is it not because of food and drink, but because of money, because of clothes, because of the splendor of the earth that he daily declares war on God and his neighbor; Is it not because of an addiction to the earth and to earthly, vain wisdom that he breaks daily and incessantly the inner union with God, abandons faith, hope and love, prayer, or conversation with God, flees from the house of God, from serving God; Is it not because of an addiction to the belly, to earthly things in general, that he daily quarrels with his neighbor, envies, loves money, overeats, gets drunk, starts litigation, quarrels, fights; Is it not because of an addiction to earthly things that man, created for heaven, forgets about heaven, created for eternal cohabitation with God - leaves God, created for light - loves darkness, created for holiness - loves lawlessness? Don’t tell me about the successes of modern education, about civilization, about the sociality of peoples, about the prosperity of sciences, arts, arts, industry, about railways, about telegraphs, about all kinds of conveniences of earthly life - all this is earthly. But look at how faith and morality have fallen with civilization, how little they now think about heaven with all these conveniences of earthly life, which is considered by many to be the only one; how pride and luxury intensified, how rich and civilized people became hard-hearted towards their brothers - the poor; How has the Christian spirit, the spirit of the Gospel become so little in the mutual relations of people to each other? And all because of the belly, which reigns over all, because of wealth, which is the god of this age. Around our heart, as around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent of envy, malice, pride, gluttony, voluptuousness, fornication entwines itself daily and torments us with these passions - which is why all these sins are called passions. This serpent comes out through prayer, tears, vigil, and fasting. God! When will my soul and my flesh be sabbathed from passions, from gluttony and excessive drinking, from greed, envy, stinginess, malice, pride, fornication, despondency, evil suspicion, covetousness, ambition, laziness and other passions? How long will I work for the mental Pharaoh, making plinths 11, that is, working with the carnal passions to which he incessantly incites me and which he strengthens in me? Alas for me, the accursed captive of Belial 12! Woe to me, glutton! February 26, 1870 Thursday of the First Week of Lent. Every day there is a fall into sin and spiritual wounding, and every day through prayer there is salvation from the Lord. Glory to Your mercies, glory to Your mercy, glory to Your long-suffering, O Lord! Damned - I haven’t left my sweets yet, and they hurt my soul; I have not yet abandoned my covetousness, and it scourges me; I have not yet left my anger, my envy, and they torment me. When will I break all connection with sin? God! Help me, for I am weak and sinful. How long will I be angry with the poor for the sake of this perishable money? How long will I not serve them in simplicity of heart? Not with a good will, but with crafty pity, with this demonic sting in the heart, which I sometimes feel stabbed into my heart at the table at home, and while giving alms, and when looking at the beauty of a face, and so on? How long will these ghosts hurt me? For everything earthly is decay, sleep, smoke, steam. Every day my soul is corrupted by sin from the devil - and every day, through the prayer of repentance, salvation, cleansing and renewal of my soul comes from the all-good and generously gifted Lord. Glory to His bounty, and His power, and His goodness! I am corrupted daily from malice, rage, envy, covetousness, stinginess, internal fornication, pride, vanity, despondency and other sins - and again 13 I am renewed by the action of the Lord who comes within me. I thank the Lord, who has vouchsafed me, in the power of the fortress, to celebrate the early Divine Liturgy, to partake of the Divine Mysteries without condemnation, and to partake of His verbal sheep. My weaknesses were great and my struggles were great, but the Lord strengthened me and placed me above both weaknesses and illnesses. Glory to the Lord, who did not put me to shame and poured out His countless mercies on me. What I asked of the Lord in the morning, at home and in church, he gave to me, as the All-Good and Most Generous and Most Merciful. I thank the Lord for His fatherly providence both for me, a sinner, and for the poor, and for giving His unknown servant the idea of ​​giving some amount to distribute to them. Every extra sip of food or drink is a falling away to some extent of the heart from God and a transfer to the side of sensuality, so if we allow ourselves excesses for a long time, for example, a week, a month or several months, then the soul moves even more away from the Source of Life - God, and the more it plunges into sensuality. So, I noticed that if I do not serve for a long time and enter church service, then I have great mental and physical weakness, my voice itself is weak, I am very timid, irritable or envious, angry, covetous, and so on. When the grace of God, as a result of sincere, tearful prayer, tears apart the bonds of sin and removes from the heart the corruption of passions, fleshiness, or the clothing of sin, then the voice becomes strong, sonorous, pure, pleasant. My powerlessness against the devil lies in food, in excess, especially in wine. The alluring or charming and captivating power of sin: sin constantly flatters, presenting persons and things in a deceptive form, casting on us and others the shadow of evil, vengeance and disgust, or the shadow of lust, or the shadow of fear and fear; one must constantly fight against delusion. I thank the Lord, who has made me worthy to celebrate the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, the first in Great Lent, without stumbling, although with great mental and physical weakness, and to partake of the Holy Mysteries without condemnation, and to speak a word with sufficient boldness. The voice is weak, trembling; there is tightness in the right side. At the christening in Galkinaya Street, where Apollinaria's wife Alex was. Polikarpova (a theater fanatic), performed baptism calmly, with faith and tenderness, but at the end, after anointing, before reading the Gospel, he painfully stumbled due to vanity and man-pleasing because of his velvet cuffs - and was put to shame, and was left with cramped conditions, and took her home. After this, please be vain and please the worldly man, who today exists, but tomorrow, perhaps, will rot and stink; deign to leave the Lord because of corruptible beautiful things - you will taste death not for a short time. Oh, the most heavenly Sacrament of Baptism! Verily, I must be heavenly during and after. Do not look at beautiful or valuable things - they are snares for the soul, poison for the soul. I thank the Lord, who called me so opportunely, according to my spiritual need, to spiritual work - to perform the prayer of the mother in labor and the Sacrament of Baptism over a sick baby outside the city in the English cemetery at ten o'clock in the evening; By your power, Lord, I defeated the enemy who oppressed me. Oh, the divine mystery of Baptism! Oh, wonderful revival and renewal not only for those who are baptized, but also for me, the baptizer! March 2, 1870. It’s terrible how the enemy inflames our hearts and our flesh with an addiction to worldly pleasures! If we see a particularly beautiful face, it inflames lust; Do our family eat and drink without us, when we are not allowed to touch food? Do strangers take what is ours? It’s a disaster: anger at our household for eating and drinking without us, and some kind of pity for scorching food and drink, anger at strangers for taking ours; Whether the time has come to receive a brilliant reward, sin torments with desire; you receive a reward - and again the soul is wounded and bound by lawless desire, and again it is convicted of addiction to earthly things. But a Christian must be above the earthly, must be heavenly. Nowadays they reject the Divine authority of the Church and again place human reason on the throne, as it was before the revolution. But what will this lead to? To complete debauchery of morals (as it led) and to the terrible wrath of God, which will allow destructive human passions to manifest themselves in full force. On the Week of Orthodoxy, in the evening, in the Kronstadt Theater, live pictures were given: floating, half-naked naiads and the like. Oh, adulterous and sinful world! He enters into a struggle - with whom?.. With the Savior, with the Church... What after this is female beauty?.. A devil's trap. The theater wants to present itself as moral. We don’t believe: Satan was transformed into an Angel of Light 14. We know the theater by its fruits and by its undisguised aspirations - to release any scandal in the form of living pictures; we know that the theater, in its purpose, is completely contrary to the Church of God, and those who love the theater hate the Church, mock it when they come to church, or even leave it completely. The theater is a school for the adulterous and sinful world; The Church is the school of Christ God; the theater partly has an educational value, but it educates only the sons of this century, and not the sons of light, and the Church educates citizens of heaven, children of God, members of Christ... If you can mock the morality of children and people of any gender and age, then let the light mock and, blindfolded, go into the abyss. You, Lord, convert the foolish... We are not surprised that debauchery publicly raises its head, even in Lent, under the pretext of freedom, but let the world know that this is freedom of the flesh and sin, and not holy freedom. Corruption on earth is not a novelty: it existed during the contemporaries of Noah, during the contemporaries of Lot, during the contemporaries of the prophets Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jonah, Hosea, in all times of paganism; it was present during Christianity - in all countries; he reigned wherever the Gospel and the Church and the society of believers were despised; the society of the elect was always small, according to the word of Scripture: many are called, but few are chosen [Lk. 14, 24]. The apostles, for example the Apostle Peter, predicted about the spirit of modern society, so contrary to Christianity: in the last days difficult times will come. For people will... be voluptuous... according to their own desires they will heap for themselves teachers who have itching ears; and they will turn away their ears from the truth and turn to fables [2 Tim. 3, 1–2, 4; 4, 3–4]. Do not look at the beauty of a human face - lest the enemy ensnare you with carnal pleasure and lust, and you fall into inner adultery; or so that, captivated by the beauty of the face and appearance, or disgusted by the ugly, one does not despise the inner splendor of the soul, which also happens to ugly people, for the Christian faith teaches one to despise earthly, perishable, temporary things as something unimportant, but those that belong to the soul are immortal things. There are temptations to Christian hope and they show whether it is in a person or not: they show either his cowardice, despondency, despair, or his courage, generosity, fearlessness; such are changes in earthly happiness, threats of taking away property, and so on. You must firmly trust in the All-Provider God, without Whom not a hair of your head will perish [Lk. 21, 18 ]; The devil brings despondency, sadness, melancholy, fear, gnawing and disturbing the heart of a person, but he must be defeated by fervent prayer. Anyutka's maid's passport: how the evil one worried me at night with thoughts of losing her passport! I will not forgive myself for the fact that when I came home from Vespers on March 2, I was in too much of a hurry to write notes about the Tver peasants to Titov, about hiring them, and that’s why I filled two notes with ink twice, and was in a hurry from impatience and greed for food; I will not forgive the fact that I ate greedily, as if I had not eaten for a week, and ate a lot: oatmeal, mushroom soup, potato cutlets, and drank a lot of tea. Why is the time of fasting given? For the purification of souls and bodies, for abstinence of passions, for the hope of resurrection; for spiritual work, for the implementation of the Gospel of Christ in life and deeds, for the collection of spiritual fruits, so that there is something to appear to the Lord of Life. What are we doing?.. Through madness, malicious intent, through our corruption, we let ourselves down and lose the last opportunity for good; There was little disgrace outside of Lent - we must continue and intensify it even during Lent! How will we meet the week of the Lord’s Passion, how will we worship His plagues, raised for us? How will we worship His resurrection?.. How will you be resurrected, with what kind of flesh were you once, who boldly [mocked] the statutes of the Church of God? Do not humiliate the rank of priest by your embarrassment in front of the powerful and rich of this world, for the most part proud and arrogant, but be always cheerful, courageous, important, or dignified without pride, and do not be afraid or ashamed of the one who wears purple and a crown, for the rank of the priesthood is great on earth and in heaven, and no less than that of a king. Anyone who is tempted in Russia will suffer, for God cannot be mocked. (Tsar.) Hypocrisy is personification. Theater has the morally unfavorable side that it first of all teaches you to lie, puts you not in your own, but in someone else’s secular role, which often does not suit you at all; disguises your personality, doubles it, disfigures it, whereas all of us, according to the word of God, should be in complete simplicity and naturalness; further turns into a toy vain human affairs, which many should not know and do; turns both the human word and the person himself into a toy; people often amuse themselves at the theater with what they are ashamed of doing and saying, that is, with vanity and sin, which it would be indecent for a Christian to even think about, and thus they place themselves in direct opposition to their Christian name and title; They are predominantly vain people, they learn freedom in thoughts, words, actions, they take off the reins of modesty and bashfulness - behold, they are no longer like that... Who does not know that the theater imparts to a Christian a spirit that is not Christian, but anti-Christian, free, immodest, unchaste, adulterous. Everything that is in the world: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not from the Father, but from this world [1 John. 2, 16]. What the world has, that is what it gives; as is the tree, so is the fruit; as are the teachers, so is the teaching: worldly teachers – worldly things and teaching. Who wouldn’t say that theater is fun for those who are completely well-fed or sufficient, happy, who have not yet known themselves from a Christian point of view, but a hungry, unhappy Christian, or a Christian who has realized his wretchedness has no time for the theater, just as in times of trouble there is no time for laughter. I will probably offend theater lovers with these words, but God forbid that I offend them to repentance... according to God, so that they see the incompatibility of theater with true Christianity, so that, bypassing all the roles of actors and actresses, they mentally bring onto the stage a sinner with his corruption, who died alive in his sins, who distorted and desecrated the image of God in himself, ready to plunge into the abyss of hell, into the flames fiery... And these theatrical trifles, these spectacles have no reason to amuse a person and hide from himself the real state of his soul. We are perishing, brothers and sisters, we are all perishing in sins: is there any fun here? Trying to help us, Lady, we are perishing from many sins, do not turn away Your servants vanity, You and the only hope of the Imams. Open the doors of mercy... Open the doors of repentance, O Life-Giver... This is a picture of our present state! We are all in trouble... and we are amusing ourselves with our troubles... How long?.. Isn't the end soon? Isn't there a coffin, a grave soon?.. And there, behind the coffin?.. Judgment, Gehenna! Or do others not believe in judgment, Gehenna?.. They believe or do not believe, but God remains faithful [Rom. 3, 4 ]: what he said, that is and will be... And the unbelievers will still be in fire, like the rich man mentioned in the Gospel... I thank Thee, most merciful, merciful and beneficent Lord, for Thou hast daily prayed for me for my sins, forgiven my sins, taken away the sorrows and hardships of cruelty, and protected me with Thy Divine peace, and revived, and made me glad. So now You have poured out Your great mercy on me, Your unworthy servant, forgiving me, a repentant one, for my anger at the cleric for his discordant and sluggish singing of stichera on stichera and granting me peace; I thank Thee, for Thou hast consumed the corruption of sin and renewed me. Bless, my soul, the Lord and, my whole inner being, His holy name... who cleanses all your iniquities, who heals all your ailments... Blessed be the Lord [Ps. 102, 1, 3; 118, 12 ]! March 4, 1870. Are you seeking glory for yourself in this world, in which our Lord was so cruelly mocked and tortured, in which the apostles were dishonored and tortured, in which hierarchs and martyrs endured various temptations and torments, in which the saints renounced everything - all splendor, all luxury, all sweetness, honor, acquisitions? And the world passes away, and its lusts, but he who does the will of God abides forever. Do not love the world, nor the things in the world... For all that is in the world is lust... [1 Jn. 2, 17, 15, 16]. Temptations show what kind of love we are wounded by: the love of this world, the love of worldly honor, earthly sweets, wealth - or the love of God. Grief at the deprivation of honor, distinction, money, sweets, elegant clothes and other things shows that we are deceived in our hearts, we fall away from God and [love] this temporary world. Indifference when deprived of them shows that we despised the world and loved God and the next age. Church and theater are opposites, like heaven and earth, like spirit and flesh: in the Church everything is heavenly, in the theater everything is worldly; there everything is spiritual, holy, here everything is carnal and, to be honest, mostly sinful; in the Church the name of God is constantly glorified, in the theater they don’t even think about it, but worldly heroes are glorified; serving the church is serving God, playing at the theater is serving mammon and the amusement of the sons of men, mainly the arena of human passions, sometimes, however, a representation of fiery love for the king and the fatherland. I thank my Lord, who helps me to unfalteringly and boldly perform the Lenten service and the most Presanctified Liturgy with the prayer behind the pulpit. I thank the Lord because I am confident in the Lord. People probably forgot that woe to the man through whom temptation comes... whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble... it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck [Matt. 18, 7, 6]. Sin is simple as the culprit of sins, and the poison of sin instantly infects the entire soul, entering through sight or hearing or other senses. At night, never eat any cabbage soup or soups, of course, prepared in the morning or before noon and after that until two o’clock, because they are harmful, as if overcooked, and they greatly relax the nerves, making the person who eats them, especially those with weak nerves, suspicious, irritable, angry, fearful, and cowardly. (I myself experienced this in the second week of fasting from Friday to Saturday, after eating mushroom soup at night after confession. In general, you should avoid food and drink at night, unless you take something strengthening, for example, a glass of wine and something salty, such as herring and other things.) Speaking about the Church and the theater, I must make the following comparison: the Church is the earthly heaven with its holiness, wisdom, beauty, this is Christianity in its essence, with its teachings, the Sacraments, with its crusader life in the world, with its struggle with sin, the world and the devil, with its triumphs over its enemies visible and invisible, with its hopes; theater is, in a small form, in the personification of the adulterous and sinful world, with its vices, passions, intrigues, with its cunning, with its carnal lust, lust of hair and worldly pride. After yesterday’s mushroom soup (pretty), I felt very ill during Matins, then at Father Porfiry’s house during confession, especially during mass; he served with extreme weakness, gave communion to the people with coldness in his heart, not having the strength to pronounce ordinary words, he did not speak - and did it badly; It seems that the communicants were cold too. The trouble also came from the fact that I myself did not read the prayers for communion, did not warm myself and my spiritual children, which is why I remained cold, although I read prayers at home with tears. From now on, read your prayers yourself, and not to the deacon. Thanks to the Divine Mysteries, I completely recovered from extreme physical and spiritual weakness, I became cheerful, healthy, calm, and cheerful. Glory to the Holy Mysteries of the Lord! I thank the Lord, who gave me the grace of warm and tender prayer during the all-night vigil in the Assumption Church. I celebrated the all-night vigil from beginning to end, without fail, cheerfully, calmly; Only when reading the Gospel I became a little embarrassed and missed two or three words due to demonic delusion (the last Gospel of Luke). The Lord constantly works in me miracles of His goodness, His power, saving me from the violence of sins, healing my infirmities, creating peace in me and quenching the storm of sins, or the anxiety of sins. Alex visited Elizabeth. Shakhova, sick. When looking at her face, disfigured by illness, and her heavily swollen belly, she showed cunning and cold insensibility, inspired by the enemy, and not sincere condolences about her sick member; Know that a healthy person is not a friend to a sick person, just as a rich person is not a friend to a poor person. But then, when he boldly spoke about the common infirmities of man and about the sins common to all, as illness, misfortune, and the common culprit of sin - the devil, then the guile passed and a sincere feeling appeared. Worldly sorrow produces death [2 Cor. 7, 10]. Deep truth. Today I woke up at night, and the thought came to me about the loss of Komarov’s (my maid’s) passport and the possibility of me being fined for it, and my heart was saddened, but how! – I couldn’t sleep, I was aching, and that’s all – just death. Finally, with internal prayer, I stopped it, placing my trust in God; This is what it means to be afraid of losing your entire fortune! The fasting person first loses the stench through not eating meat and fish and frequent prayer and vigil, and then, as he fasts, prays, thinks of God, vigils, humility, and mercy, he achieves the fragrance of holiness and incorruptibility, by the grace of God, but after death. Fasting is so beneficial! Seek not external brilliance, but the inner luminosity of the Holy Spirit, which comes from contemplation of God, humility, kindness, abstinence, and prayer. Love for external splendor is a sign of an adulterous soul. It is strange that we, constantly living in the darkness of sin and not caring about the purification and enlightenment of the soul with the light of God, chase after external brilliance in order to cover up our gloominess or replace it with external brilliance. Before the Holy Mysteries, all that remains is to love God with a fiery soul, to revere and give thanks. Life-giving and terrible Sacrament! Woe to those of little faith, the wavering, the double-minded! God has partly given and allows us to experience through inner experience how bitter and terrible hell is, what languor of torment awaits unrepentant sinners after death. We must remember the horrors of hellish torment and pray to God for ourselves and for others, so that he does not let us die in sins, without repentance, so that evil demons do not steal our souls. A proud, covetous, passionate man, a glutton, is a tyrant of his brethren, a murderer, for he proudly passes by a beggar asking him for bread, clothes or lodging for the night, and does not deign to pay him any attention. This is an insane idol, this monster between people, which is ready to swallow everything sweet for its own pleasure, to collect all the riches of the world and use only itself, to dress in the most exquisite and precious materials, but to give nothing to the demanding brethren. Judgment without mercy will be such from God, whose mercy, generosity, and love for mankind they often hear and themselves glorify. I have seen such hard-hearted people and I am disgusted by them. They spare nothing for their fornications, but they will not give even a penny to the poor. The priest - the representative of the Church, her unshakable firmness, her truth, straightforwardness, simplicity and purity, her meekness and gentleness - must everywhere: both in the church and in homes - to demonstrate these qualities in himself before people of every rank, condition, gender and age, even in the face of the most sovereign, and not be embarrassed in the least, not doubt, not look at faces, and at the same time remember the firmness of the confession of the faith of the saints apostles, hierarchs (especially Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Nicholas the Wonderworker and others), martyrs, saints, whose place and rank he occupies in the Church of Christ. I thank the Lord, who has given me the grace to perform the Divine Liturgy without stumbling in the Assumption Church in the Duma, and to partake of His Divine Mysteries without condemnation, and to pronounce the word of God (sin is a great flatterer) with boldness, and to perform the prayer service of thanksgiving without stumbling. There was very great crowding in the womb and weakness in the insides. The transformer transforms him. So justify in your thoughts the person who is good at times and evil at times, and love every person. Forgive me, Lord, for until now, due to my senselessness and passion, I have not acquired trust in Your Providence when giving alms. The degree of self-love and attachment to earthly life can be seen from the pity that we discover when we lose money, or when we are asked to borrow a significant amount of money, or when we need to share our favorite foods. The Lord performs the miracle of renewing my corrupted nature daily and many times in one day: He takes away the corruption of malice, envy, gluttony, covetousness, fornication, pride and other passions. Glory to the faith of Christ! Oh, the dearest guarantee of the love of Christ within me is the image and likeness of God! How one must love one's neighbor, created in the image and likeness of God! Why should one partake of the Holy Mysteries on an empty stomach? Because a well-fed soul tramples on an honeycomb [Prov. 27, 7]. A well-fed man is bold towards the Divine, but a drunken man cries out in the church and makes a riot in the sanctuary. Grant us Thy divine renewal, O Lord! One name for me: a sinner corrupted mentally and physically. Catholicism and Lutheranism are paganism in Christianity in principle. The fruits of Lutheranism - materialism and atheism - are worse than paganism. Through communion of the Divine Mysteries, through faith in Christ, prayer, I am constantly saved from anger, rage, the unity of the world, covetousness, fornication and other passions and enter into the peace of God, being honored with the purity and simplicity of God. We quarrel with our neighbors primarily over food, clothing, money, faults, disobedience, and other things. And love is the fulfillment of the law. The Lord is our beauty, our peace, our light, our strength, our life, our dignity and greatness, success in our deeds, our true reward, all our glory, our wealth. Who is in my heaven? and with You I want nothing on earth. My flesh and my heart faint: God is the rock of my heart and my portion forever [Ps. 72, 25–26]. Who and what can replace the Lord for us? Where does our love for the corruptible, adulterous and sinful world come from? Love for matter, for transient, fading beauty, for perishable wealth, for local honor, for perishable clothing, a temporary home? Awards have become a second life: serving people rave about awards day and night. During confession one must make a sincere vow of correction and holiness of life. The enemy always tries to keep my soul in darkness and cramped conditions, raping it. We don’t strengthen ourselves well inside, and we grumble that our enemies are beating us. Every person is in the image and likeness of God, although he bears the wounds of sins. We must regret this mental illness - sin, which has infected all people, this blindness of mind, the evil inclination of the heart and will, the darkness of hell that envelops our hearts, and in the sin that corrodes humanity, we must see a reason for love for everyone, and not for enmity, for intense prayer for people. How deceptive earthly beauty is, how the enemy is caustic through it - through a single unclean thought. It is important to cleave to the one God, for in Him is life 15, light, strength. About the impermanence of everything earthly and changeability, about the imperishable beauty and the greatness of the image of God in man; the first concern is to restore and renew it. Draw a picture of the corruption of all the imaginary blessings of this world: beauty, strength and courage, earthly education, wealth - and the beauty of the immortal soul. Here is your treasure, man, your wealth, your inexhaustible treasure, enclosed in this perishable bodily vessel, your philosopher's stone, here is the Divine fire in you! What treasures should you chase, honors, sweets? Know yourself, educate yourself according to the thought of God, according to the word of God - and you will be blessed forever. In the current positive and material age, they forget this task of human life, and some reduce man to the level of a dumb animal and do not extend his life beyond the grave. The devil tries in every possible way to attach the image of God to matter, to matter, and puts into the souls of many the idea that the soul itself is not the image of God, but a product of matter; but such a conviction kills all morality, all sociality of people, overthrows the order of family and social life and directly contradicts the Gospel. Man is like wheat in a field. When the wheat is ripe, the owner of the field and the wheat sends out a sickle for the harvest. Each of us is a spikelet in the field of this world; only everyone is given freedom to see: if he wants, it matures and fills, if he doesn’t want, he doesn’t. The desire for brilliant distinctions, for example, a golden pectoral cross, scorches the soul, like any passion. Let us not be adorned by external differences, which give rise to vanity and arrogance over our neighbors, but may we be adorned by the grace of Christ, or the virtues of Christ: non-covetousness and poverty, meekness, humility, kindness, patience, mercy, contempt of the glory of this world, obedience, or faith, hope and love, as it is written: all of you who were baptized into Christ have put on Christ [Gal. 3, 27 ]; and: For let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus [Phil. 2, 5]. Through the desire for earthly distinctions, the devil steals faith, hope and love from our hearts, nails us to the ground, darkens our hearts and thoughts, oppresses and scorches the soul, as in hellish fire. And this is a worthy punishment for those who want to be vain on earth about what constitutes the subject of the deepest reverence, faith, hope, love - not earthly, but heavenly, which demons tremble at. So man and the cross, our true glory, not in gold, however, consisting, turns into an object of vanity, and although such a crusader is glorified on earth, at least by some, he deserves and will suffer dishonor from God, from the Angels and saints, for he was vain about the thing that saves, and he turned for himself what is a means of salvation from enemies and from passions into a means of death, into an instrument of the enemy battles and victories over oneself. No one considers wearing a golden cross to be a cross, out of grateful and reverent memory that the Author of our salvation was crucified not on gold, but on wood, that the cross for him was an instrument of dishonor and cruel torment, while we made it an instrument of vanity. We do not mourn our vanity, which we brought even into the instrument of the unrighteous execution of our Lord. We do not renounce the golden cross, like St. Sergius of Radonezh, but we do not have its peace, serenity, heavenly freedom, but we are restless and impose burning iron shackles on ourselves. Such is our madness! Such is our passion for earthly splendor! Rewarding with golden crosses is contrary to the essence of the Christian faith, which condemns vanity, external splendor, and covetousness; it often closes and blinds the eyes of a person’s heart, giving him a reason to forget inner poverty, inner darkness and the ugliness of his passions and to place his glory not in inner merits, secret virtues, but in outer splendor - in a word, it introduces Pharisaism, which was beautiful (red) in appearance, but inside is full of graveness and wickedness [Matt. 23, 27]. God! save me from Pharisee vanity and emptiness and fill my soul with virtues; Let it be not from man, but from You, my God, that glory will come to me, that I may be spirit-bearing and not gold-bearing. (March 9 days, 1870.) While I prayed to God undistractedly, until then my prayer was successful, I felt how heavenly peace, freedom, the life-giving stream of grace of the Holy Spirit entered my heart; but as soon as I thought during prayer about being rewarded with a golden cross and expressed fear that the Consistory would prevent me from receiving it, writing in the certificate that I had not presented conversations for the second half of the year, the peace disappeared from my heart, the stream of grace withdrew, and hellish fire, darkness, crampedness invaded my soul, the soul became paralyzed, deadened, incapable of prayer. This is how earthly thoughts and passions harm prayer and the structure of spiritual life! This is how destructive the worldly unity of our spirit is. How necessary it is to be above the world - let us escape the snares of the evil one, which are placed everywhere for our snare! Oh, how earthly addictions corrupt the soul - for food, drink, clothing, awards and distinctions, for money, for luxury, for entertainment - they spiritually paralyze it, deprive it of peace, light, freedom, bring darkness, crampedness, and languor! How peaceful and free is the soul, standing above all earthly things - the soul of one who fasts, who is God-minded, sincere, who prays without distraction! This is an earthly Angel! Miracles are now rejected because they assume for certain that the world arose out of natural necessity and is also developing - and there is supposedly no omnipotent Creator. Meanwhile, miracles are at every step! Miracles and the Christian faith have been and are being confirmed. It is misfortune for a Christian if he does not see grief, but crawls down the earth: he only eats, drinks, adorns his body, collects wealth, seeks earthly rewards, distinctions, pleasures, entertainment: he falls away from God and becomes a pagan: pagans seek all this [Matt. 6, 32]. Gluttony, untimely eating and drinking are heavy fetters for the soul. Let me feel the pulse of the faith of Christ among our scientists: I will truly appreciate what they are, these vaunted scientists, these heralds of human knowledge, these public oracles. Try to become a friend of Christ, and not a friend of men, for the sons of men are vain. All-damned sinner, I daily and incessantly corrupt myself, willingly or unwillingly, with various iniquities, and the All-Merciful One unceasingly, through the prayer of my repentance, has mercy and renews me, rescuing me from spiritual and physical corruption, unceasingly works in me miracles of goodness and power, bringing me from sinful abomination to holiness, from sinful death to life, from hell into His light, from powerlessness into strength, from cramped space into space, from sorrow into joy, from humiliation into glory. Glory to Christ God, who so graciously works in me unceasingly; glory to the faith of Christ, which cleanses, enlightens, nourishes, renews, revitalizes and strengthens our souls! Taste and see that the Lord is good [Ps. 33, 9 ]! Lest he come suddenly and find you sleeping [Mk. 13, 36]. We sleep when we only eat and drink, but do not think about the works of God; we sleep when we collect the wealth of this world, when we seek the honors and distinctions of this world or glory from people, and not the glory of God; we sleep when we worry about vain decoration, about worldly entertainment; We sleep when we indulge in voluptuousness, fornication, gluttony, drunkenness, covetousness, theft, deceit, when we offend, deceive, become discouraged, murmur, blaspheme, quarrel, are proud, envy, quarrel. (We are then dead to God, just as a sleeping person is dead to those around him.) In a word, when we do not care about pleasing God, about saving the soul, about cleansing and correcting our thoughts, a corrupted heart, a corrupted will, then we sleep. Hitherto, like small children, we are foolishly carried away by greed for food and drink and often eat and drink as long as there is a desire, although our body is not a child’s, it has long stopped growing, it is sufficiently strengthened by daily nutrition, and, perhaps, every day in excess, although the desire for food can be false, from habit and addiction; We often repent that we ate more than we should, but then again we allow ourselves excesses, but these excesses burden and bind the soul and body more and more, immerse it in sensuality and the varied passions of life, not allowing grief to mature, expel the grace of God from the soul and remove it from God, bring relaxation into the soul and body and, finally, cause sudden death. Here I am, a stupid person, not by nature, but by abuse of reason and will! Be patient, have mercy on me! Enlighten and correct me! March 11, 1870. Thy kingdom come [Matt. 6, 10], the kingdom of love, meekness, kindness, mercy, abstinence, justice, purity. Malice, enmity, hatred, envy, hard-heartedness, covetousness, intemperance, partiality, untruth, and the abomination of prodigals reign in us. Every day we work with the mental Amalek. Do not pamper your sense of smell, but smell smoking tobacco in your heart and at home without annoyance, just as you smell without indignation in other people’s houses, and do not treat a smoker with hatred and disdain, although he often bothers you or smokes against your desire, for after all he is a man and your brother. Do not envy a rich, hard-hearted and stingy person and do not wish evil in your heart, but be kind in a brotherly way and leave it to God to dispose of him, and be content with little and thank God, and cleanse your heart in every possible way from passions and acquire Christian virtues - this is priceless inner wealth that lasts forever. At your death you will realize how precious this wealth is and how deceptive and insignificant that perishable one is. I thank the Lord, who surprised me with His great mercy through my prayer and the great confusion and tightness from my heart, who took away and invested courage and courage when reading the prayer of permission over the tomb of the late Colonel Ragodin in front of many military officials and ordinary people and the governor himself; I thank You, Lord, for You did not allow the darkness of hell to embrace me while reading the prayer behind the pulpit, and although in a timid and trembling voice, You helped me read it slowly; I sinned that I released the words of my stumbling - like forty days... Moses; I doubted - and for that the enemy stood in front of me like a terrible ghost, and there I was afraid of fear, where there was no fear [Ps. 52, 6]. He who loves himself (the self-lover) does not care about the benefit of his neighbors, which he could bring to them with his help, intercession, and prayer; being himself pleased, he does not even think about the fact that many are very bad: such am I, a sinner! If at any time, especially during Great Lent, there is a problem in eating fish, especially raw salmon and caviar, and drinking wine at the same time: the devil, who especially fights against us during the Holy Pentecost - the time of Christian deeds, raises a strong fight against a Christian who lives piously, but allows himself to break the fast on occasion, unnecessarily; he fights him with especially lustful passion and even supernatural passion. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to avoid delicacy and satiety, especially during Lent, so that we do not become inflamed with bad thoughts and movements of the heart, and do not fall into boy-conceit or woman-devonism. But our misfortune, our weakness, is that we know the consequences of gluttony, namely extreme fornication, but we do not stop gluttony out of negligence. We will be subjected to even more severe punishment for this, as those who knew the will of the Lord and did not do it. March 12. Spoiled by the contentment and pleasing of people, the rich and noble are extremely ticklish and irritable, and this is a natural punishment for them, which they have prepared for themselves. To avoid it, they must work and please others for the good. Each of us must daily offer to God some kind of legal and favorable sacrifice, for without sacrifice it is impossible to be saved; sacrifice yourself daily, or something that belongs to you, for example, property, distributing it to the poor, or something else. Remember the greatest sacrifice for the world of the Son of God. Until now, I, a sinner, am wavered by the words of worldly people who condemn me for wasting my property on the poor, and I become discouraged and irritated at the beggars who come to me for alms, being of little faith and loving human glory or human opinion more than the glory of God and the word of the Gospel. How unsteady am I hitherto in giving alms, and in hope in God, and in love for the poor! Why am I hitherto like a reed shaken by the wind, why am I shaken by the words of the mighty of the earth? They do not read the Gospels and the writings of the Fathers and do not know about the importance and fruits of alms, but I often read them and constantly see how much alms means when given wisely and correctly. I thank You, long-suffering Lord, who has now accepted my repentance and had mercy on me - but I was angry with the beggars who relentlessly followed me, and with Brother Alexy, who smoked tobacco in my room during confession on March 13 in the Third Week of Lent. I thank the Lord, who helped me and made me wise to confess my ninety-five spiritual children. Came home from church at eight o'clock yesterday. Confession during Great Lent on the heels, with the help of God’s grace and with skill, becomes easier and easier, according to the word of the Lord: My yoke is easy, and My burden is light [Matt. 11, 30], as well as baptism, and partly other Sacraments. You must dedicate your pleasure, time and life to the shepherding of human souls. Where should we rush during confession? Who is driving us? Self-interest or desire for peace and idleness? But self-interest is the death of the soul, and idleness is the mother of vices. The best time of life is work. Let us work for the salvation of ourselves and others. He who reaps receives his reward and gathers fruit into eternal life [Jn. 4, 36]. Saturday before the Week of the Cross. I thank my all-sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who took away sinful corruption from my soul and body and gave me His Divine life through the communion of His Divine Mysteries at a liturgy in the Duma church, performed at the request of a widow for the repose of her husband and their relatives. What an infinite difference between corruptible food and this incorruptible food: that one corrupts the soul and body, it is burdensome, but this one revives, pacifies, strengthens the soul and body. Throughout the liturgy, one feels a great weakness of soul and body precisely from perishable food, from excesses, more or less tolerated daily by me, a sinner; but after communion with faith of the Divine Mysteries, a new life begins - heavenly, worldly, blessed, holy, angelic. I thank the Lord, who took away from me the sinful corruption that struck me after the insincere greeting of my brother, Archpriest Matthew, in the cathedral during Matins on March 19; and I greeted him insincerely because I was indignant at him in my soul for his love of money and withholding wealth. I, a sinner corrupted by all kinds of sins, dared to hate my brother for his sins, when I myself am bound by countless sins of voluptuousness, lust, love of money, pride, envy and others, as if we do not have a true and righteous Judge God, to whom we will all give an answer and who tests the hearts and wombs of all people! Doctor, heal yourself [Lk. 4, 23 ]!.. So, I must humble myself and truly consider myself the last of all, the most vile, the most lawless, the most worthless, and not look at the sins of others, so that I do not forget about my own. Remember, Christian, the speed of the devil, the speed of thoughts and passions inspired by him, which, like an arrow or lightning, suddenly strike the souls of the unwary; remember the simplicity of God, the simplicity of your soul and the simplicity of virtue: like life-giving lightning, the grace of God suddenly visits the souls of the worthy and cleanses their sins, sanctifies, enlightens and strengthens the souls of the pious. Who am I that I should condemn my brother, and more than my father, Matthew, for the love of money, when I myself am sick with all sorts of passions and weaker than all my brothers? Have I forgotten my sinful corruption? your lewdness? your fornications? May I remember my sins and humble myself; May I leave behind my pride, and malice, and envy, and gluttony, and covetousness, and other sins. We abhor some of our neighbors because they emit the stench of passions, but we don’t even look at ourselves and don’t think that we smell the same: someone else’s stench, carnal or mental, is disgusting, but we always put up with our own. The sorrows and illnesses that befall us have the beneficial effect of turning us inward and teaching us to know ourselves, our mistakes, shortcomings, passions, which we had not seen before or did not want to see and from which we did not consider it necessary to correct ourselves. And if this is so, then sorrows and illnesses are a great blessing for man, and blessed be God, who allows these sorrows and illnesses to befall us; may murmur and despondency be removed. I thank the Lord, who has made me worthy to perform Matins and early Liturgy without stumbling on this Week of the Cross. There were many temptations, such as: indignation, zeal for the sexton who knew little to sing, for the failure of singers to come to mass; but the all-conquering grace of God tamed the mental beasts in me, that is, my passions, and overthrew in me all the instigations of the enemy at the beginning of the liturgy, before the great entrance and during it; Only during the transubstantiation of the Holy Gifts did the evil spirit disturb me with excessive impetuosity, my haste in calling on the Heavenly Father to send the Holy Spirit upon me and on the offered Gifts, while there was still enough time left after the blessing of the Holy Gifts. How long will my state of spirit be slavish and not mastery in such terrible moments? You have been called to freedom, brothers... do not become slaves of men [Gal. 5, 13; 1 Cor. 7, 23]. The prayer service of the Iveron Mother of God was served by the grace of God without stumbling, although the enemy instigated, confused, worried. Glory to the grace of God and the Queen of Heaven. Before dinner at Mrs. Ragozina's, while blessing the meal, he stole the last words of the blessing of the meal due to the action of the enemy and his own cowardice, he was afraid of fear, where there was no fear [Ps. 52, 6]. Darkness of thoughts and rebellion of thoughts; and before that I drank a glass of gin. I thank the Lord, who saved me from the stumbling block of the enemy upon the arrival of Marya Konstantinovna and Anna Andreevna to me, and especially during their meal with me - from the senseless pity of the heart for food and drink, or from an addiction to this decay. Everywhere with me are invisible enemies, invisibly besetting me, and earthly passions - but the Lord is also everywhere with me: just call heartily, just recognize your passion, its madness, just leave the absurd attachment of your heart to dust and desire to cleave heartily to God, the Source of Life and all good - spiritual and material, just remember the Provider: call on Me on the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will glorify Me [Ps. 49, 15]. (March 16.) Monday of the Week of the Cross. Are we your shepherds or not? Should we save your souls, teach you, admonish you, punish you with all the measures given by God, lead you to salvation, and should you obey us? And do you want eternal salvation? If you wish, then listen to us, and do not dispose of us, do not condemn us: we are the judges, not you. The father of lies and the enemy of God and men is constantly intensifying to steal and erase the truth of Christ from human hearts, making daily, constant, invisible undermining in souls: undermining faith and good deeds or completely destroying in some both faith and truly Christian deeds; sows in the hearts wickedness, hypocrisy, malice, pride, envy, fornication, gluttony, covetousness, absent-mindedness, despondency, laziness, parasitism; service to God tries to turn from internal only into external ritual, without spirit and strength, or it brings darkness of thoughts, rebellion of thoughts, fear, false shame, oppression, bitterness and stumbling upon the one praying, or it brings coldness to the soul during the performance of prayer, during the performance of the Sacrament and deeds of piety! Who can list all the machinations of the all-evil enemy?.. But for this reason, we must fight against him all the more with fasting, vigil, prayer, standing firmly on the rock - Christ. March 16. Fight against your multi-passionate flesh day and night and tell it: I don’t believe you, I don’t listen to you, troublemaker of my spirit, my enemy, friend of Belial! You jump for joy when you yourself eat and drink sweets, and when you have to constantly share them with your brother, you become depressed, regretful, angry like a tiger, suspect that he eats too much and will soon eat and drink you so much that you will have nothing to live with; and you forget the providence of God, and the commandment of love, and the peace of God you regard as nothing. I cry and sob when I think about death. Who should I cry about - is it this dead man? But God's servant Elizabeth fell into a blissful sleep, uniting with the Lord in the Sacrament of Communion. I'm a dead man myself! My mortifier continually puts me to death, although while I am still alive in body, grace through the prayer of faith revives me again. The death of sin rages in me every day, and in all of us, and - alas - many of us do not notice it. Nasty, blasphemous and evil thoughts, [and often] words and actions, defile the soul and kill, but many do not even think that through this they die spiritually; We enslave ourselves daily to the belly, indulge in gluttony and drunkenness - and do not notice that the soul is dying through gluttony, gluttony, drunkenness, and we amuse ourselves with our vanity. We indulge in absent-mindedness, gambling even on the Holy Pentecost - and we do not think that in this absent-mindedness the soul perishes and our enemy triumphs over us; the evil tyrant - love of money - dominates in our heart, demands daily sacrifices, removes us from prayer, contemplation of God, reading the word of God, from alms - and we do not want to notice that we are bowing to an idol, moving away from the Source of Life and sleeping a sinful death; Every day we inflict deadly wounds on the poor soul with malice, hatred, envy, pride, and - alas - we do not feel our spiritual death, we do not realize that we are spiritual dead. The soul dearest to the whole world, redeemed by the Blood of the Son of God, dies daily. We should cry every day, pour out sources of tears - but we are cold as ice, our hearts are petrified. Oh, deliver us, Lord, from petrified insensibility and breathe into us a feeling of repentance and tenderness. Life-giver, have mercy on us. Amen. Brothers! We will all have to die sooner or later. But now our souls are dead. Let us weep for ourselves, so that with the help of tears of repentance our souls will be resurrected from evil deeds. Amen. O terrible perverter of my nature - an all-destroying and absurd sin, forcing me by force to think and commit vile lawlessness! I deny you, I blow on you and spit on you out of disgust for you! In the might of the might of the Lord, may I crush you under my feet quickly. Lord Lover of Mankind! Give me grace above earthly sweets and all worldly merging, for the demon of earthly lust, like an evil tormentor, torments me, fiercely incites me to pursue pleasure, to pursue envy and malice destroying it, whereas I should indifferently give it up to those who want it, without losing brotherly love for them, which is the fulfillment of the law, with all my heart to cleave to the spiritual, infinite, hypostatic, most holy and life-giving sweetness - the Lord Jesus Christ. And then, clinging to earthly sweetness, I miserably fall away from Heavenly Sweetness, losing peace of heart, love, meekness, and holiness. A worthy punishment for sensualists. Treasure peace of mind and do not be indignant over any sweets or things taken from you, considering everything no better than rubbish. (Amen.) Have peace and love with everyone, it is said, except for (without whom) no one will see the Lord [Heb. 12, 14]. Remember that you receive everything freely from the Lord: do not regret anything and give for free. Oh, the sting of sin! People, beware of this thorn: it is directed at you every minute. Veliar does not sleep! Watch and pray so you don’t fall into misfortune! For the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak [Matt. 26, 41]. Do not be proud and partial to your multi-passionate and lusty flesh, but deny yourself and your flesh: for he who loves himself and his flesh is often forced to be indignant, hurt, hostile, quarrel, envy, proud, servile, flattering, fall into illness, misfortune, despondency; but he who despises the flesh is above all this and is always at peace, trusting in the Lord. Under no circumstances should you compare, O priest, a person and what he consumes, and do not feel sorry for the latter. Man and what he consumes: food, drink, money, various and countless things, are as distant as heaven from earth; man is in the image of God, the king of the whole earth (by God’s definition), and what he uses is insignificant decay. But the devil incites us to consider this decay as great and to despise man, who has an infinite price, who has an immortal soul. And this is great malice, and envy, and the wickedness of my flesh, that when I want and how much I want I feast, I eat and drink delicious dishes and drinks in abundance, and when family or frequent guests eat and drink my delicacies, then I get angry and lose my temper because they consume expensive delicacies immoderately; meanwhile, I would probably eat and drink them as much as I want, if I really had a disposition for them, and if I were not completely full, and if eating them did not bring me harm. Ropat crudelis ebinjatia bilis 16. How do Russians fast with a woman’s condition? They will buy native fish, various jams - raspberry, currant, Provençal butter, snacks and other things, feast on them, overeat - and imagine that they are fasting. And laughter and grief for the owner of the house, forced to see all this abdominal agony. While the Week of the Worship of the Cross now continues and the free crucifixion of the Lord of glory for us is remembered, I, a sinner of countless passions, indulge in gluttony, envy, and hatred. The Church remembers how the Good Shepherd laid down His soul for His sheep out of love for them, and I, appointed shepherd of the verbal sheep, redeemed by His Blood, feed only my flesh and my passions and do not care about the sheep; and how can I feed the sheep when I still do not know how to feed myself in the pasture of the Gospel, when I have not yet learned self-control, meekness, humility, kindness, goodwill, non-covetousness, mercy, hope, love, obedience? My flesh goes into a rage, it rages when its beloved delicacies, money, clothes are taken from it - but then it is necessary to tame it, and not to intervene, not to be irritated when they take what is mine, but to give voluntarily and willingly, according to the word of Christ: from the one who has taken what is yours, do not demand it back... and do not prevent the one who takes away your outer clothing from taking your shirt [Lk. 30, 29]. But I still have not learned to live according to the word of the Lord and I am furious when they take something of mine. Don’t touch ours, I say, like my ancestors, although, according to the Gospel, I need to say: take everything from me, just leave me alone. Why do I not save my soul at the sight of Him crucified for the sake of my salvation? Why do I pay attention to the unimportant - to sweets and so on - and not pay attention to the most important - to the soul? Why don’t I eradicate passions, but rather eradicate love? Why don’t I love God and my neighbor, but rather the world and its blessings? I am strange, I am wild, I am absurd. I am worse than a drunkard, although with a drunkard there is the same madness and frenzy as with me. Therefore, I should not condemn anyone - for I am the most sinful of all. Every Christian must learn to sing divine songs so that, while singing them, he does not give room in his heart to the cry of wild passions. Be filled with the Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord... As in the day, let us conduct ourselves decently, not indulging in feasting or drunkenness [Eph. 5, 18 – 19; Rome. 13, 13]. Sometimes passions oppress us like hell, cruelly, fiercely. Who's to blame? We ourselves. They especially torment us for frequent eating and drinking - and this happens to us all the time. I thank the Lord, who has vouchsafed me, despite many temptations from the enemy, to perform Matins and the Presanctified Liturgy in the Duma church in the turn of Father Archpriest, to partake of the Divine Mysteries without condemnation, to read the prayer behind the pulpit and the prayer of permission over the deceased servant of God Elisaveta Shakhova. (In words of fourty... and then stumbled from the enemy’s embarrassment and doubt.) Allow the sons of flesh and blood to eat and drink as much as they want at your or your meal, and do not be jealous of them with evil jealousy, so as to be equal to them in eating and drinking sweets; and you are zealous for the thought of God and fasting, as a disciple of Christ, as a priest, whose very title is obliged to philosophize on high, and not on earth, 17 as a performer of the heavenly Mysteries, as one who has received from Christ as his inheritance the leadership of the heavenly verbal flock of Christ, as the shepherd of Christ, who must, like an eagle, soar above all earthly things. Leave the dreams and ghosts of the tempter the devil, who tempts you through your lack of faith, gluttony, and covetousness with bread, and enter into the peace and joy of your Lord. Leave worrying about this plinth 18 - your flesh, and about these meager 19 - money and food, and about this web - clothing. How can we not see that all this is ephemeral, fleeting and leaves no trace, while it confuses and corrupts the spirit, separating it from the Source of Life - God. How do you not care about the salvation of an immortal soul perishing in sins, how do you not shepherd the souls entrusted to you from God and the Chief Shepherd Jesus Christ! We must diligently give alms in the name of Christ, so that the gifts of God are spent not on our prodigal flesh, but on the salvation of the soul; and you must mortify your body and enslave it, and not pamper it with delicacies and drinks, not weaken it [the flesh] and at the same time your heart with untimely eating and drinking and long sleep. Those who love theatrical spectacles necessarily turn their gaze away from their souls, from the spectacle of the passions warring in their members [Jas. 4, 1] ours, and from knowing ourselves; they turn their gaze away from heaven, from the mystery of redemption, from the spectacle of the cross and Calvary, resurrection and ascension, transfiguration, nativity, baptism and other sacraments of the Christian faith, worthy of constant contemplation. Plays and dramas are most often a weave of vanity, lies, and human passions, because playwrights must invent a lot of things that never happened. A majestic, holy, wise building - a man! And how the enemy of God, the devil, is intensifying to pervert it! What evil thoughts does he not put into us regarding man, or nasty, evil, envious thoughts! As long as he doesn’t disfigure morally every day! And this is his occupation, his pleasure! Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spirits of wickedness in high places. For this purpose... put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil [Eph. 6, 12 – 13, 11 ]! Accept the face of a handsome person equally with an ugly one; love the person with both faces equally, for the human soul is the same in both. I thank You, O most merciful Lord, for You have granted me the grace to peacefully confess my spiritual children (one hundred and sixty-five people). But forgive me my partiality and cowardice, that I was embarrassed when reading the prayer of permission over some of the noble and rich of this world - and therefore was stumbled by the enemy. Give me the grace not to look at anyone’s face, even at least the face of the most powerful, and not to deviate from Your judgment either to the right or to the left. I also thank You for mercifully listening to me cry out to You from the heart, and quickly saving me in temptations, sorrows, troubles, hardships and in every situation. Glory to Thee, my Benevolent One! Behold, even now you have saved me from the trap of sin. God! Teach me to see Thy member in the face of a beggar, to give him alms in simplicity, with good will and while maintaining due respect for the person receiving alms, and not with grief and contempt. God! Teach me to do the holy work of divine alms! Until now I have not yet learned to give alms, I am still upset at many beggars, I still emit the stench of pride, covetousness, malice, gluttony, and greed. I thank You, Most Merciful, for You have granted me the grace to perform the early Divine Liturgy without stumbling with my heart and lips, to receive communion without condemnation and to give communion to up to four hundred communicants. But there were many temptations from the enemy, especially at the beginning of the liturgy and during the invocation of the Holy Spirit for the offered Gifts: the spirit stumbled, confused, stole words and thoughts. Oh, the malice of the enemy! I thank the Lord, who did not cast me away from His presence for my intemperance from drinking tea before the all-night vigil, and although I thereby deprived myself of the spirit of prayer and weakened my heart, He again gave me the gift of deep, concentrated, peaceful prayer. Resurrection. April 26, 1870 Gluttony, satiety, drunkenness, fornication, covetousness, malice, envy, disobedience, waywardness, theft, bribery and other sins are a falling away from God and a combination with the devil. Be extremely careful of all sin, as apostasy; repent immediately after committing a sin. In the church I must forget myself: through me the Church must speak, the pillar and foundation of the truth [1 Tim. 3, 15 ]; but I must cast my sins into the goodness of God - the Good One will have mercy: for He is the hedgehog to have mercy on and to save. You offend the Holy Mother Church unrighteously and boldly, and if you are justly offended, this is a disaster: you are on your hind legs. You say that you pray briefly, but with a short prayer will your spirit flare up?.. Will the samovar suddenly boil? Does wood suddenly catch fire due to friction? But we are often cold as ice: please melt our icy heart in two or three minutes. The Most Holy Lady Theotokos is one spirit with the Lord, and God is the whole Unsleeping Eye, all the Hearing. Therefore, the Lady simply, in an instant, sees all our thoughts and desires, hears all the secret sighs, our internal and external prayers, and She must be invoked with faith, in repentance, with fear and love at all times, with the hope of speedy hearing. She, according to the Church, is the Most Quick Intercessor. When we are greedy for food, or for money, or for shiny rattles, when we begrudge the poor money for food and clothing, or food and clothing itself, or good food that we ourselves love, then we fall into worldly unity, our hearts fall away from God, and we are sick with sinful pride. The uncleanness of masculinity, misogyny, and masculinity remains in these fornicators by nature and through nature for a long time, even when they have long given up committing these sins, and lurks like fire under the ashes, ignited at the first breath of an unclean spirit and with gluttonous living. Frequent vigils, fasting, tears, fervent prayer, and exhaustion of the body are needed. The bread of the needy is the life of the poor: he who takes it away is a bloodsucker [Sir. 34, 21]. This is the sin of not giving alms. He kills his neighbor who takes away his food, and sheds blood who deprives a mercenary of his wages. Sirach, 34 ch. [Art. 22]. A man who fasts for his sins and goes again and does the same thing: who will hear his prayer? and what reward will he receive because he humbled himself? [Sir. 34, 26]. A lesson for those who fast. The giver of alms brings a sacrifice of praise [Sir.] 35 ch. [Art. 2]. The Lord is a judge, and He has no partiality. A lesson for a priest performing spiritual judgment on a penitent. Sir., 35 ch. [Art. 12]. Do not eat fish during Lent: eating it causes cramping and nighttime fornication. I ate it with pleasure at lunch and in the evening at dinner, and the evil one, seeing the disposition of the flesh, sent beauties to me in a dream, who supposedly came to pray with me to God (Satan was transformed into an Angel of light), but then suddenly began to frolic with me and tumble somersaults, but the memory of my wife and awakening saved me from prodigal sin. Thanks be to God, my Guardian Angel, who protects me invisibly even in my sleep. Oh, my greed, my greed! May I not follow my appetite, may I not be servile to it, just as I should not follow the lustful movements of the flesh. Hitherto, the accursed one did not voluntarily endure famine. March 23, 1870. I thank the Lord, who strengthened my heart and opened my lips - to perform the Divine Liturgy of Basil the Great on the fourth Sunday of Great Lent (Fifth Week), to partake of the Divine Mysteries without condemnation and to say the word with boldness. While reading large prayers before the consecration of the Gifts, the devil poured coldness and indifference into my heart. Oh, many-witted one! I condemn myself for my anger, that I sadly said to the beggars who approached me at the gate of the house: why are you all bothering me? where can I get all of you? I showed lack of faith, lack of trust, murmuring towards God and insolence before Him and the poor, in whose person He Himself accepts. Forgive and have mercy, Lord! (I gave it to them.) The waves of sweets and gluttony are heavy: a glutton is angry, irritable, lascivious, proud, envious; his heart is shaken by an evil spirit, like a reed by the wind, painful, sad. This happened to me (and happens) when I drank a lot of sweet tea in the evening and ate fish greedily. Haven't I come to my senses yet? March 23, 1870. I sinned against the Lord that I gave alms in the evening to the poor (who stood at the gate of our house) not in the spirit of love, humility, faith and trust in God, with annoyance, grief and stinginess, sparing not people, but money. What should be considered happiness, I take as misfortune with my crafty, voluptuous and covetous heart. How long will my actions disagree with my words? Know that God shows you to all the poor, loving you, so that for your small mercy towards them He will have mercy on you with His great mercy. Know God’s good providence for you and be ready to fulfill God’s will. Remember that you have nothing of your own; be above earthly love; be all sorrow; love the heavenly souls who came from God and were created in His image and have mercy on them, not forgetting that the Savior Himself in their person accepts your giving! Oh, how one must be able to give alms, with what simplicity, with what willingness, with what humility, zeal, love, meekness! How much anger I still have! I become upset and embittered with the clergymen or even the father of the archpriest, Father Matthew, the fathers of the deacons because of a trifle, with the beggars because of an extra penny - and all because of the substance! Oh, earthly passion! Oh, alienation from heaven and from the ineffable blessings there. Or again, what kind of seduction does it inspire in you when in church and generally during prayer you are embarrassed by looking at the beauty of a face, or at someone abounding in wealth, or simply at someone wearing rich clothes! Oh, earthly beauty! And you, truth, you, heavenly holy beauty, where are you? Why have I not yet clung to you, to your shrine, with all my heart? Clinging to you is bliss, but clinging to earthly beauty is torment! Oh, gluttony! Because of you, how much cramping and embarrassment I suffered during the Divine Liturgy! How much the ethereal enemy captivates me because of you! Liturgy of the Presanctified on March 24, during which I felt especially strongly captivated by the enemy and which, however, with great struggle, I performed safely through the grace and bounties of God, except for not saying the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian after May He Be Corrected; I will have a memory for a long time. After communion, I felt great freedom and boldness in myself, and I read the prayer behind the pulpit with abundant hope, without fear of the enemy’s hesitation! Why would I become angry at the beggars who persistently demand an increase in my alms, if I had no addiction to my belly, to money, to this temporary life? Wouldn’t I joyfully give all my excess to the poor if I remembered and fulfilled the saying of the Lord’s Prayer: Give us this day our daily bread; in a word, if only one were content with what was necessary! Wouldn’t it be sincere, wouldn’t it be fatherly, that I would then pity the poor as my womb, as my soul and body, whereas now addiction to earthly things petrifies my heart, deprives me of Christian compassion, arouses rage at those who ask, and often deprives me of peace and clarity of thought. Remember how corruption and death reigned a thousand times in your soul and body from your passions and how, after your difficult struggle with death, the Divine life of the Holy Mysteries prevailed over corruption, and you were miraculously revived, renewed with the youth of an eagle 20 - and thank for this with all your might the Giver of Life and the Savior. I thank You, Lord my God, for you have often grieved me for salvation, allowing me to see all the bitterness of sin and showing me the sweetness and peace of virtue. I thank You, because through the temptations you bring me, you show me what I am like, how sinful I am, how many passions and infirmities I have, so that I do not become exalted; I thank You for purifying me through the very temptations, so that You may make me useful and pleasing to You. I thank the Lord, who surprised me with His mercy with His great help during the celebration of the liturgy at the Annunciation in front of a multitude of people and with victory over the fighting invisible enemies. I will not hide my falls from myself either: at Vespers I was weak, at the prayer service at the Gospel I missed some words out of embarrassment and fear of demons; at Avdiy Petrovich’s prayer service in Isakov’s house, he laughed hysterically, although not out loud, seeing Avdiy’s fussiness. Those who have sinned against the Lord! I am a reed shaken by the wind. Where is the sedateness and firmness that a priest needs? Is it these little beggars whom the Angels... in heaven always see the face of the Father... in Heaven [Matt. 18, 10 ], do you regret perishable alms? Do not be afraid that you will accustom them to laziness and parasitism, for they are still small and cannot work; and besides, they feed their old parents or helpless widows, and already in such years they fulfill the fifth commandment: Honor your father and your mother... [Ex. 20, 12; Deut. 5, 16]. Leave zeal and rage on them for their persistent requests, for the fact that they chase you everywhere; thank God that it is not you who need to go to them, but they who come to you and do not leave you until they receive alms from you, which will bring you mercy from God - just give in simplicity and willingly, and not in your hearts or with malice and rage. What you give to God in return, Christ Himself receives it from you. Do not be embarrassed by the words of others that you are multiplying the poor with your handouts, that you are breeding parasites or future swindlers. You yourself know that your beggars are truly poor, fully deserving of compassion and alms. How many times do you need to be convinced of this? Do not be greedy, money-loving, voluptuous; It’s better to deny yourself, your many-passionate flesh, and give it to the poor. Do not believe the cries of your flesh - you know how crafty, evil, voluptuous, envious, covetous, and irritable it is. When we are given a generous reward for small work, which is useful for us, we accept with pleasure, although we already have the means for bodily life, and sometimes in abundance; and when we have to give alms to the poor, we feel sorry, cowardly, and irritated, as if it were a matter of sacrificing our lives or labors for them beyond our strength. Oh, evil, ungrateful and senseless! How long will we be slaves of corruption and the devil, or better: how long will I, a sinner, be a slave of corruption? How long will I live for myself, and not for Christ, my Lord and Benefactor; How long will I recklessly and impudently deny being an instrument of His all-good Providence for the poor? How long will this thorn in the flesh, this earthly thorn? How long is it not the sting of heaven, the sting of God? O my rebellious flesh! How many times have you hurt, tormented, ruined me? Why haven’t I crucified you yet, haven’t I hated you? Why don’t I despise the sweets, acquisitions, honor that make up your life and strength? I thank You, Lord, for You have granted me to perform the Presanctified Liturgy without stumbling, and to read the prayer behind the pulpit in full, and to partake of the Divine Mysteries without condemnation. This visible world is beautiful, but it is only the faintest shadow of the beauty of the invisible world, and is subject to decay. Strive to become a citizen of the eternal world, the future century. Man is beautiful, but all his beauty is given to him by the invisible human soul, the most beautiful of the body, while the body is earth and pus. Look how sometimes pus flows from a beautiful body; Imagine how many impurities flow from a beautiful female body, cleansing and lightening the body and thereby imparting beauty to her. Do not marvel at any face, but marvel at the soul, which is the image of God; marvel at the imperishable beauty of the face of God. Those who see Your face have indescribable kindness. Glory to Thee, Lord, glory to Thee. Do not change your lambish disposition for any reason, your gentleness into brutal malice, and do not transform yourself from an angel into a devil, remembering that you so often partake of the Lamb of God Himself. Today you were furious with the sexton for the absurd singing of Now the powers of heaven... and Taste and see... and how by this you offended the Lamb of God, Whom you had to receive communion and then received communion. Good singing is also a kind of sweetness: sweetness of the ear, but not of the belly. I thank You, Long-suffering and Many-merciful Lord, for deliverance from great evils, for transforming evil into goodness, crowdedness into space, spiritual fire into the cool dew of grace. Glory to Your power, Lord! Glory to Your mercy! During mass before communion, during Compline while reading the akathist, the Lord revealed His power in me. I was already starting to get angry before the end of confession, but I came to my senses and prayed to God for patience. And the work of confession is extremely useful for both my soul and body. God bless! There were one hundred and fifty-nine people at confession, with godly old men. Don’t judge anyone: you either do it yourself, or you will soon do the same. Pay attention to yourself. The more I think about the path of Providence about me, the more I see that all material benefits, as well as spiritual ones, are given to me from the Lord tuna, freely and in abundance, given by parishioners in simplicity, and therefore I must give tuna to the poor and all those in need, in simplicity and in abundance, willingly, without zeal and vexation. Lord, help me! The beauty of children consists of innocence, modesty, and simplicity of heart. Beware that the devil does not instill in you an evil suspicion about people, about the food consumed by your household in your house, that there is a lot of this and that, that this and that eats and drinks a lot, that expensive and delicate foods are bought and consumed (especially rich rolls), - but be indifferent to all these dreams of the evil spirit and look for the Kingdom of God in yourself and in others. The kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit [Rom. 14, 17]. Do not listen to the insane cries of the flesh, crucify it diligently. Don’t be upset about the poor because of frequent handouts of money, done willy-nilly; try to always give willingly and suppress pride and covetousness. I myself felt sorry for my brother Alexei during lunch, because in the morning, due to the enemy’s actions, I was sparing him tea, sugar and rolls because he was drinking tea alone. What a respectable person! The Creator put everything under his feet. Take, eat, this is My Body... Drink from it, all of you, this is My Blood of the New Testament... These are the words of the Creator, who created the whole world with one word. The Hypostatic Word of God creates everything with one word and the Holy Spirit. Glory to Your power, Lord! Why does wine turn into Blood? I am the vine, and you are the branches [Jn. 15, 5 ]: the rods feed on the sap of the vine! Oh, beneficence! Oh, deification, oh, unity! I thank and glorify the Lord, who forgave my sins and strengthened my heart with His grace to perform the Divine Liturgy (late) without stumbling, and to receive communion without condemnation, and to say the word with great boldness before communion of the Holy Mysteries, and to receive communion with due calm, majesty and boldness of the people of God. March 28, 1870 What a blessing it is to live in labor for the Lord! I resolutely renew myself from them. How healthy, peaceful, light, cheerful I am! Wonderful priestly service! Saturday. Evening. I visited Goremykin, an artillery lieutenant colonel. They praised my sermon on the theater. God bless! They talked [...] about school and the abnormal upbringing of children by parents, how their mothers teach them from childhood to coquetry, how they instill arrogance and vanity, to treat kindly only with people who have weight in society, and not to honor those who have weight with a bow. In Paris there is a play at the theater: “Now there are no children”! At ten or twelve years old, children have already experienced a lot like older people. With whom do children willingly dance?.. And what kind of scenes are there in clubs?.. What hubbub, fights, noise, quarrels?.. Chancellery officials, military men, merchants, many townspeople and peasants, you have fallen into one-sidedness: while busy with your worldly affairs, you forget the heavenly cause, the only thing needed - the salvation of the soul and pleasing God; after all, through Baptism, your soul became a heavenly citizen, flowed to the Heavenly Jerusalem, which is our true, eternal fatherland, for entry into which we must prepare here, and you forget about this heavenly citizenship and behave like only earthly citizens, as if you were only local residents, as if another world does not await you after death - all your activities are adapted, located only in relation to this earthly world: education, and reading books, and entertainment, and games, and work, and worries. The nature of a Christian is deified by Jesus Christ - how should a Christian look at himself, his soul and body, with what respect, how should he guard against all sin, especially through nature, how should he practice every virtue. And here, Christians by name, even after communion, allow themselves drunkenness, debauchery, vain gambling, and so on. A Christian has been given much from God, infinitely much, and much will be required of him at the Judgment. Write a sermon against those who say that there is no need to go to church - and you can pray at home, or there is no need for external prayers - you can pray in your soul. The saints are all in God and one spirit with Him, and God is the All-Seeing Eye, therefore, they see all people in God, all their thoughts, just as during life many are seers. So, stand and pray with fear before the images of the Mother of God and all the saints; of course - before the image of the Lord Himself. Children! All these external sciences are the husk, but faith and worship are the core, the true bread for man, the bread of the eternal life. Strengthen faith in your heart, love worship, think about what is happening in church. Lord Jesus Christ, I thank You with all my heart that through my inner prayer You delivered me from the nasty demon in the apartment of my comrades - Shirsky and Vereshchagin. My most kind and obedient benefactor, glory to You! Amen. March 30, 1870 Grant to me, Lord, Lamb of God, to acquire through Your grace the lamb’s inner meekness and unchanging, constant kindness! The letters of Saint Isidore Pelusiot 21 should be placed in sermons. What power! Plastic! Self-observation. On March 29, Sunday, I was visiting my comrades, the gymnasium teachers Shirsky and Vereshchagin, drinking tea and punch in the smoky air; sat there for two hours. Both this tobacco-saturated air and this punch had a bad effect on me, especially the next day: I was irritable from a breakdown of nerves; my flesh was raging with anger against the poor; from this anger I was as if in hellish fire, and only through intense inner prayer of repentance did I ask God for forgiveness of sins, and peace, and freedom of spirit, and inner coolness (I thank the Lord). All gluttony is a problem for me. At twelve o’clock I took a bite when I didn’t feel like doing it and didn’t have to: this again caused a new mental trouble. There was a whole field of thorns inside me, all over my insides. And how good it is to cleave to God through inner prayer! The internal thorns are all destroyed. Blessed are those who work for the one Lord! When we see real beggars, we should naturally feel pity and compassion for them, and at first we really sympathize with them; but when they begin to ask us for alms every day, and many of them, then pity for the poor, through the action of the old man who has not yet died in us and through the action of the devil, turns into pity for money, and not for the poor, and we already begin to be angry with them, to despise them, to avoid them, although the many-merciful and generous Lord does not abandon us with His generous gifts. And this means starting to build the 22nd pillar and not completing it. Almsgiving is a great thing, for it alone is sufficient 23 to save our souls - the Church sings during Great Lent. And the Lord of life and death says: by mercy... there will be mercy [Matt. 5, 7]. Why run away from your mercy? Why not fully pardon the poor? What does reading secular books, especially novels, lead to? To unclean love, debauchery, cooling towards faith and the Church, towards the Gospel and even - alas! - to suicide. One justice of the peace shot himself while reading a novel by Victor Hugo - the book was unfolded at the place where one character in the novel says that he is the oddest person in the world. Justice of the Peace Klavdiy Arkhipov (from the University) suffered from evil suspicion (the usual intrigues of the devil), as if everyone hated him, despised him, as if he was an extra person! These are the fruits of unbelief! Completed a course at St. Petersburg University. Do learned people need spiritual education, do they need to read the Gospel, the writings of the Holy Fathers, do they need to go to church? Will novels provide a cure for mental illness? Isn’t Christ the doctor of souls, isn’t the Church the savior?.. The murder happened on the Annunciation. Cases of suicide between noble men and women are not uncommon even in Kronstadt. I am still rude to the poor, these meek, these lambs, rude because of my belly, because of my corruptible body, because of my addiction to wealth; where is the love, reverence for Christ, in the person of the beggar accepting alms? How long is the bad habit? How long will the gobbiters be reproached 24 and the proud be humiliated? How long is the evil skill? How long will I not become a friend of the Lord by simply doing good to the poor? Woe to me from drinking tea with a roll in the morning: because for this voluptuousness and satiety (what drink, what food in the morning? Isn’t it too early?) The Lord betrays me to an unclean and evil spirit. So, today, April 1, Wednesday, when after drinking tea with pretzels I came and began to serve a prayer service to Secretary Nikitin, a prodigal demon attacked me internally, drowned my whole heart, and I could not serve calmly, but was embarrassed and stumbled; A cloud of thoughts and a rebellion of thought came over me; I was completely tied up and captivated. This is what voluptuousness and satiety mean, drinking and eating at the wrong time, without need. Oh, how necessary abstinence and fasting are. Then he served two more prayer services: with the inspector at customs and with the guard at the gymnasium - boldly and smoothly. But when I went to give communion to the girl Evdokia at Klimov’s house and the beggars insistently pestered me, I, the accursed one, could not stand it, I pulled one white-haired boy by the hair so that he fell off his feet, although he immediately stood up - and I was not afraid, and I was not ashamed of the Lamb of God, carried by the angelic ranks 25, but even in His face I allowed myself insolence, malice, robbery. O great sinner! And all because of gluttony, love of money, pride, impatience! Now, do I really not yet see the need to not eat or drink anything in the morning and to give up gluttony altogether?.. Do I, a Christian and a priest, allow my heart to be filled with fornication and the malice of the devil? Gluttony is the mother of evil. Oh, hateful, flattering and damned sin! When we enjoy sin, we do not see its harmful consequences; they appear after the vegetation 26 unclean. The incontinent person causes fornication, and malice, and love of money, and all kinds of sin to himself. Oh, if we only kept in mind the consequences of our words and actions, the consequences of deviating from the word of God, the commandments of God! How careful we would be! But we are foolishly carried away by the sweetness of sin; They loved earthly, temporary sweetness, not heavenly. Grant me, Lord, the grace to be indifferent to all worldly pleasures, and wealth, and honor, and to be above all earthly things, and to exalt myself as one undergoing a heavenly service and called to the heavenly fatherland. The enemy constantly, noticeably and imperceptibly, wounds us with love for earthly things and by all means cools us towards heavenly things, turning us away from heavenly things. How long, Lord, will I labor in the misery of the clay, until I choose the life above? How long will you be hurt by the thorns of worldly addictions? Until I spit on all the sweets, wealth, ephemeral honors? How long will I not rest completely in You, the sweet peace of my soul? In church services, as if on a stone tablet, all the destinies of the world and the entire economy of our salvation are inscribed; Those who constantly attend divine services can hear here throughout the year the entire Gospel, all the speeches and miracles of the Lord and the apostles, the entire life of the Lord, His suffering, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. Here you can hear many speeches of the prophets of God of the Old Testament; here you can hear the story and praise of the lives of the saints, their countless faces. Here all festivals and celebrations of the Christian faith are celebrated; faith, hope and love are nourished here. Every virtue is taught here; here the Trinitarian God is constantly glorified. When using such a heavenly gift as the Divine Mysteries of the Body and Blood of Christ, all earthly blessings must lose all their charm and be considered nothing, like a shadow before reality, like sleepy dreams before real blessings. The Lord sent me such a thought when, while giving communion to a multitude of people, I thought and partly envied that they were all almost the spiritual children of Fathers Paul and Matthew, my co-servants, that they almost alone took a rich wave from them, and left me to give communion (Oh, my God! Isn’t it the greatest happiness to teach the people of God the Divine Blessing?); The damned one imagined that they were already rich, but that more wealth was flowing to them. But I also thought, remembering the Lord’s saying that a person’s life does not depend on the abundance of his possessions [Lk. 12, 15] that a priest especially should not cleave to anything earthly and should be all grief, like one bearing an angelic rank and performing angelic service, that with wealth there are many pitfalls against which our soul beats and often crashes, that it is impossible for God and mammon to work [Matt. 6, 24; OK. 16, 13 ]; that it is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in wealth. With these gospel truths, I dispersed the nasty thoughts that began to confuse and oppress me, which I found from the enemy. Blazniti (Church Glav.) – to seduce. Plintha (Greek) – brick. The Egyptians cruelly forced the children of Israel to work and made their life bitter from hard work on clay and bricks... from all the work that they were forced to do with cruelty (Ex. 1, 13-14). Belial (Heb.) – lit.: obscene, unpunished; name of the devil. Paki (Church Slavic) - again. Wed: Satan himself takes the form of an Angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). Belly (church glory) – life. There is a violent flow of bile (lat.). Wed: philosophize above, (a) not earthly (Russian: think about things above, and not about earthly things) (Col. 3:2). Skudel (Church Slavic) – clay, clay vessel. Wed: your youth is renewed like an eagle (Ps. 102:5). Saint Isidore Pelusiot († 449) - originally from Alexandria, asceticised near Pelusium (an Egyptian fortress near the eastern branch of the Nile); in Constantinople I listened to St. John Chrysostom; was a mentor to the hermits; denounced Nestorius. His letters, which have reached us in the number of two thousand, represent a treasure of wisdom and piety. Saint Isidore Pelusiot is commemorated on February 4/17. Zdati (church-glory) – to build. Satisfied (church glory) - sufficient; capable, suitable. Gobzuyuschiy (Church Glorious) – rich, happy, successful in business, proud, arrogant. Wed: Lord, have mercy on us, for we are filled with much humiliation: our soul is especially filled with the reproach of the gobblers and the humiliation of the proud (Russian: Lord, have mercy on us, for we are sufficiently filled with contempt; our soul is sufficiently filled with reproach from the arrogant and humiliation from the proud) (Ps. 122:3-4). Accompanied by armies of Angels. See also note. 207. Vegetation (Church Glav.) – a shoot. You might be interested in: