No one was able to refrain from tears at this solemn moment: the archpastor wept, the ambassadors wept, and everyone who was in the cathedral at that time cried.

The appointed Tsar stood up, turned to the ambassadors and said: "If this is the will of God, so be it!"

From that sacred moment, when the young Michael gave himself entirely to the will of God, he became the great Tsar and Tsar of all the Russian land. The pious eldress Martha took her son by the hand and together with him reverently knelt before the grace-filled face of the Queen of Heaven and quietly said: "Into Thy most pure hands I commend my child; Guide him to the path of truth, arrange for him what is useful, and with him for all Orthodox Christianity!"

Thus the "great old woman" blessed her favorite for the great feat of royal service; thus the accession of Michael to the throne took place. Theodorovich, the savior of the faith and the kingdom — thus the Lord, the King of kings, finally blessed the much-suffering Russian land with the gift of a Tsar after His own heart, the blessed ancestor of the now reigning House of Romanov. "And on that day, says the chronicler, there was great joy in Kostroma, and the feast of the miraculous Theodore Icon was composed."

And there was great joy not only in Kostroma at that time: both Moscow and the entire Russian land rejoiced with Kostroma. At last she survived her fierce grief, at last her red sun rose, without which there was no one to warm her, much sorrowful, there was no one to take care of her! And then the Russian people, exhausted by the adversities of the interregnum, breathed freely.

How deeply this election of young Mikhail Feodorovich was perceived by the hearts of the people as a great mercy of God to the Russian people, as a clear indication of God, is evidenced by the great self-sacrificing feat of a simple peasant Ivan Susanin. He appeared in turn as God's chosen one, in order to seal with his martyr's blood the people's love for the Tsar, the chosen one after God's heart. Here is what Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich, whom he saved, says about his holy feat in his charter given to Susanin's son-in-law, the peasant Bogdan Sabinin: "As We, the Great Sovereign, were in Kostroma (that is, within the Kostroma borders), and at that time Polish and Lithuanian people came to the Kostroma district, and his father-in-law, Bogdanov, Ivan Susanin, was seized by the Lithuanian people and he was tortured with great immeasurable torments, and they tortured him, where We, the Great Sovereign, were at that time, and he, Ivan, knowing about Us, where We were at that time, enduring immeasurable tortures from those Polish and Lithuanian people, did not tell those Polish and Lithuanian people about Us, the Great Sovereign, and the Polish and Lithuanian people tortured him to death." "Thus, as if the capital of all Orthodox Russia, this eternally glorious peasant sealed the people's love for the Tsar-Father: alone, without associates, he defended the salvation of the entire Russian land. Mikhail Feodorovich was the last of the Romanov family: there was no one to replace him, and which of the boyars the Russian people loved as much as the Romanovs, and it is terrible to think what would have happened to the Russian land if the enemy's infernal plan had succeeded?..

On May 2, 1613, the young Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich solemnly entered Moscow, blessed by the prayers of the jubilant people.

"Look," said one saint-preacher: what blessings, what memories and what kinship surrounded the young soul of Michael, the first Tsar of the House of Romanov! The blessing of the righteous from prison; the innocent execution of his still young uncles, his father-monk and metropolitan, languishing in captivity, and his mother-nun, who so reluctantly released him from humble solitude to the throne. Have there ever been Kings who have accepted the glory of the Kingdom in such an atmosphere of podvig, suffering, innocent executions, and voluntary acceptance of forcibly imposed separation? Is it any wonder, after all this, that not only Michael himself, but also his son Alexei and his grandson Theodore, who succeeded him, walked before God like the ancient patriarchs?.." Were the Tsars elected to the throne, even without their knowledge, against their wishes, forced to accept the royal crown by the clergy and the people, almost by force, in the name of the Mother of God?.. In the entire history of the peoples of the earth, only our Russian people gives an example of such a calling of their princes and Tsars because of their consciousness and deep conviction that without the Supreme Power in the person of the Sovereign Sovereign, the state cannot stand firmly, and so, at the very beginning of its historical existence, it calls upon Rurik, and when the family of Rurik ceased, it chose the blessed House of Romanov, which was closest in kinship to the Rurikoviches...

When one thinks of three hundred years ago and contemplates all these events, when one ponders their deep meaning and significance in the life of our Russian people, one involuntarily wants to turn to our clever ancestors with a plea: Oh, teach us, your descendants, to love our Russia as much as you did, to understand so truly how the Russian soul lives, as you understood, and assimilate with our whole heart the treasure bequeathed to us by our entire native history.. What was most precious to you? The Holy Orthodox Faith is the Autocratic Tsar, the Tsar is the Father of the people, the Tsar is the Anointed of God, whose heart is in the hand of God, on which the Spirit of God Himself rests from the day of his sacred anointing to the throne. (1 Samuel 16:13). It was not to an ordinary man that you entrusted the fate of Orthodox Russia, when you besought the young Michael "to have pity on the remnant of the Christian race" and not to reject the conciliar prayer: you saw in this young man the chosen one after God's heart and firmly believed that the grace of God would rest upon him in the most holy sacrament of chrismation and would guide all his deeds for the good of his native land. For you, it would seem sacrilege, blasphemy, a grave sin before God to talk about the limitation of the tsar's power by some non-Russian constitution, which is fashionable in our time about the limitation of the tsar's power by some non-Russian constitution, which, alas! - Many modern Russians are infected: I do not want to directly call such people Russians, although they bear Russian names!

With prayer and fasting you began the holy work of electing the Tsar to the royal throne, which was then orphaned, and your prayer has been heard: God Himself has placed on your heart to call upon the humble in heart Michael, blessed him and his generation, and in him and with him Orthodox Russia... Blessed be your memory for generations in Holy Russia, forever and ever!

ABOUT SPIRITUAL TRENDS IN OUR INTELLIGENTSIA.

"But all the Athenians, and the foreigners who lived among them, spent their time in nothing more willingly than in talking or listening to something new." (Acts 17:21).

"What was, will be; what has been done will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

We live in the age of radio, the age of electricity and all kinds of discoveries in the field of natural sciences. What was news yesterday will be known tomorrow to the whole civilized world, and the new invention will be brought to life, used, and it will become commonplace, obsolete, and the indefatigable science called archaeology will reveal that what we call a new invention was already known in ancient times to the Egyptians or Assyrians. But modern cultured man thirsts and waits for something new and new, like those Athenians of whom the Evangelist Luke speaks, describing the arrival of the Apostle Paul in Athens.