A hundred years have passed since the time of which the author speaks, but do not "madames and mamzels," foreign tutors and governesses, still constitute an indispensable part in the education of the children of our not only intelligent, but also semi-intelligent society? Not to mention noble families: even among merchants who have not studied anywhere themselves, who have come out of peasants, French and German women, and sometimes even Englishwomen, are already hanging around their children: you see, it is impossible to do without new languages, and it is very difficult for them to learn without this kind of pedagogue, and now a child in the golden flowering of childhood is given into the hands of these "Europeans" only for the sake of so that his highly receptive memory may be used to learn foreign languages... Parents do not understand at what a high price they buy the ease of learning foreign languages for their child; They do not understand that, without realizing it, they are entrusting these strangers not only with the destruction of certain small rudiments of the Orthodox worldview, but imperceptibly, perhaps even unconsciously. - Builds an unorthodox worldview in the child's soul? If the Russian illiterate nurse was, and undoubtedly still is, of such great importance in the education of the Pushkins and other great Russian people, then how can one deny the influence of all these mamzels and madames on the whole structure of the child's soul?.. Are they not the first, I repeat, perhaps involuntarily, the first to plant in the soul of our future intellectual the seeds of exaggerated respect for everything Western, non-Orthodox, and disdain for the native, Orthodox? Is it not because of communication with them that our children from adolescence begin to disdain the precepts of their native antiquity? It is good if the parents themselves strictly adhere to this antiquity, as, for example, the parents of the author of the above extract adhered to. Here is what he says in his notes: "My late grandfather always served at home throughout Great Lent, even without a priest, who was invited only to the first and Holy Week, to all annual feasts, to the days of the deliberate saints, and to all Sunday all-night vigils; my father, not wishing to change the order of his father, having already children, also celebrated the services of Great Lent and all the feasts for three weeks. So it came to me. The other brothers and sisters no longer remember this: they were very young, and I used to read Vespers, Compline, Midnight Office and Matins at home, at the crosses, and in church, and the Hours, and my grandmother almost every day came to my mother's house, returning from Mass from the Lebyazhsky Trinity Monastery, in which she was buried." But that was almost a hundred years ago; now you can hardly find such a family, not only in the upper classes, but also in the merchants and petty bourgeois. And children's souls grow outside of that spiritual atmosphere which is called churchliness, and other trends blow over them. The churches are alien, other impressions fall on the tender child's heart, another world outlook is imperceptibly but firmly created.

II

Children! What a priceless treasure God gives us in the person of these little ones! It is not in vain that children's souls are called angelic: our children come out of the holy font of baptism pure, alien to the sin of their ancestors, innocent creatures. Remember the word of Christ: "Unless you yourselves are as little children, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven." For the Lord also said this about children: "Their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven." Where there are children, there are the angels of God. How should we protect this treasure - the child's soul..

And what are we doing with it? From the first steps of conscious life, as soon as a child begins to babble, we hasten to give him into the arms of people who are alien to us in spirit, language, and in their entire moral worldview. The child has not yet learned how to properly name the objects around him, when French, German, and English phrases are already sown into his innocent head. Parents do not want to think at least about the fact that a Russian child under such conditions will not even think in Russian... The late Anna Feodorovna Aksakova in her intelligent, philosophically thought-out conversations complained to me more than once that it was difficult to "think in Russian": since childhood she had been accustomed to speaking German and thinking in German.

It happened that this highly educated Russian woman, not without difficulty, searched for Russian words to express some abstract concept in the field of sublime objects. But it was not her fault that her father lived for the most part abroad, in Germany, although we must give him the honor: he knew the Russian language perfectly and knew how to embody his wonderful poetic works in it.

I have reason to say, in addition to general judgments, that foreigners who are admitted to our children harm the most important thing - they imperceptibly sow their religious views in them. It is clear that an atheist cannot speak of God with due reverence. But it is also understandable that a fanatical Catholic will find both the time and the opportunity to instill in the child her ideas of purgatory, of the Immaculate Conception; it speaks to him with feigned reverence about the "Holy Father," about the "heart of Jesus," etc. It is good if a wise child asks his parents: how to treat such unsolicited lessons? And if he doesn't ask?.. One can't help but think about the question: what does it mean that even native Russian families, like the Abrikosov merchants, suddenly went to Latinism for no reason? Who prepared them for this? Oh, of course, the Jesuit Fathers do not miss an opportunity to catch in their nets our intellectuals who are infants in matters of theology; but in front of the paters, very likely, were their zealous novices, Madames and Mamzels. For a long time our merchant class has been distinguished from other intellectual estates by its greater religiosity; it is true that in recent times it has also followed the intellectuals from other estates, poisoned by the Jewish press, and even in some cases outstrips them; and yet, among merchant families, one can still meet people who sincerely believe in God, who do not forget even the one thing that is required. And this is where Latin propagandists direct their eyes, here they are looking for profit... How necessary it is to protect children from these greedy eyes, from all sorts of tutors and governesses, madame and mamzels, bonnes and tutors!

I am struck by this criminal carelessness - not to mention faith, about the salvation of the soul, but at least only about the good of our homeland, so that foreigners do not seize into their hands what our fathers have accumulated for centuries, do not force us to be farm laborers for them, do not mock us as stupid, contemptible negroes, from whom everything can be made, whatever they please! But if we are so careless and go forward, then it won't be long before that... It is as if some kind of hypnosis has taken possession of our intelligentsia: it is imperative to be Europeans at all costs, to resemble them in everything, to assimilate their ideals, their forms of life, their languages, even their dress, manners, habits... And the Russian people do not see that the Europeans only laugh at this, only despise us even more, as pariahs, as uncultured savages. And this especially plays into the hands of the sworn enemies of Christ - Jews and Freemasons: they rub their hands with joy, this is what they need. And by all means they try to promote this hypnosis, most of all they are afraid that the Russian people will wake up and remember the precepts of their pious ancestors. And so, having seized the seal in their hands, they in every possible way suggest that this hypnosis is a phenomenon of the highest degree of gratification, as a sign of culture, progress, victory over obscurantism, the triumph of civilization... That we are ignorant, that we are in everything, decidedly behind Europe, that we are ashamed to be Orthodox, that Christianity "has played its part in history, has become obsolete, is dying" - all this from day to day, under various guises, is instilled in the Jewish press, absorbed into the brains of our fashionable intelligentsia, as an indisputable axiom, against which only fools can argue... What does all this threaten us with in the very near future? Russian people, come to your senses! It is shameful and unforgivably sinful to humiliate oneself in such a way, to disgrace oneself by betraying one's native precepts of antiquity, one's native Church, one's own people! With bewilderment they look at your "lordly whims", with pity at your overseas inventions, with deep sorrow they sigh when they see your apostasy, and complain to God when you try to seduce them onto your destructive path... After all, he kept waiting for you to go ahead of him along the path bequeathed to him by history and God's Providence, that as people more enlightened by his science, you would lead him, and that you worship Baal and follow the path of the servants of Moloch... Woe to you when the people lose all confidence in you, when among you there are no worthy sons of Russia of the past centuries! You are now striving to corrupt him spiritually: he will not hesitate, having taken into his heart the poison of spiritual corruption, to descend into bodily depravity, to turn into such a beast as the world has not yet seen, as the history of mankind has not yet known...

And you are the first - remember this! "You will be the first to die in the clutches of this fierce, merciless beast!"

"My Diaries"

1913

A double-edged sword

Never, perhaps, even in times of persecution from the pagans, have there been so many dangers for the Church as in our supposedly peaceful days. It is threatened by both external and internal enemies. The external ones are sects and schisms that have openly fallen away from it; the internal ones are those who have not openly broken their unity with it, but are no longer like-minded, already philosophizing in their own thinking in matters of faith and understanding of life according to faith. And the latter, under certain conditions, can be more dangerous than the former. Having lost confidence in the authority of the leadership of the Church, they can easily submit to the influence of heretical wisdom and become entangled in the nets set by heretics. And this may happen unnoticed by themselves: for some time they will still consider themselves Orthodox, believing that the differences of opinion they have adopted are not essential, but then, having strengthened themselves in these differences, they will accuse the Church herself of misunderstanding her teaching and thus carry away other, faithful children of the Church. And these children of the Church, knowing them to be Orthodox, will listen to their wisdom without any fear and be poisoned by them. That is why we, the pastors of the Church, need to stand vigilantly on guard over the holy sites of Orthodoxy, attentively following all, even apparently favorable trends and phenomena in the spiritual life of the people and educated society, knowing that Satan is sometimes transformed into an angel of light, and poison is sometimes offered in the guise of medicine... And the more innocent the outward form in which a dangerous tendency for the Church is clothed, the more useful this or that initiative, this or that good thought is presented, the more carefully it should be discussed from the point of view of Church teaching, the more it should be illuminated by the light of the Church. And this seems to be admitted, at least by some of those who are faithful to the precepts of the Church and understand the dangers that threaten her in our day. Involuntarily, you become a little, sometimes to the point of pain, when you constantly see how the enemy creeps up from the side from which you do not expect him. And therefore, let us, the pastors of the Church, be forgiven by those good laymen (I do not expect this from pastors) who unintentionally, carelessly, out of inexperience in the spiritual life and in the matter of teaching, sometimes one-sidedly illuminate this or that question in the field of this teaching, and thus give us reason to pay attention to this one-sidedness as a warning to the children of the Church against being carried away by this one-sidedness. We believe that such instructions are useful not only to these children of the Church, but also to those who are the willing or unwilling culprits of this infatuation. In the Church of God, as in the living body of Christ, all members must take care of each other, and each must know and do his own work in the spirit of love and holy obedience to the Lord and to her, our mother, the Church.

Recently I happened to be in a meeting of the Christian Fellowship of Student Youth. The report was made by the chairman of the Society for the Dissemination of the Holy Scriptures in Russia, the venerable E. K. Pistolkors, on the topic "On the Practical Significance of the Word of God in Life." In a lively, animated love speech for the word of God, the speaker depicted the "various facets" of the word of God, comparing it to a precious diamond - its effect on the human soul, the need for a Christian to study it, to put it into practice, "to react with it to the sad reality of our time" and to strive for spiritual rebirth through the word of God... The speech ended, but, as they say, there was something left unsaid in the air. The head of the "Commonwealth", Archpriest Lahostsky, invited those present to express themselves on the content of the report, and a young girl appeared at the department. A sensitive young soul tried to express what it seemed to me that she was not the only one in her heart. She pointed out that the speaker had somehow silenced the Church: in calling for the reading of the word of God, he did not mention that in church, during divine services, it is read constantly, that when reading at home, one must be especially careful in understanding it... After an exchange of thoughts between several persons, for my part, I said that I was very glad to meet not only with the representative, but also with the chairman of the society with whom I had conducted a polemic in Tserkovny Vestnik 25 years ago. At that time I pointed out one essential defect in the statutes of this society, a deficiency which is felt especially in our time. The fact is that the society has set itself the task of disseminating exclusively the word of God, the Holy Scriptures, not allowing any interpretations of the word of God, even approved by the Church, to be distributed through its book-carriers. Such a one-sided presentation of the matter does not at all correspond to our Orthodox understanding of this essentially holy matter. Even the Apostle Peter, for example, noted that in the Epistles of the Apostle Paul "there is something incomprehensible, which the ignorant and the unconfirmed, like the rest of the Scriptures, turn to their own destruction" (2 Pet. III, 16). The same Apostle, while commending believers for turning to the word of God "as to a lamp shining in a dark place," nevertheless warns "that no prophecy in the Scriptures can be resolved by itself" and that this must be "known first of all" (2 Pet. I, 20). The speaker himself said that the word of God, according to the testimony of the Apostle Paul, is a spiritual sword, and moreover it is "sharper than any two-edged sword" (Heb. IV, 12). Whoever knows how to wield this sword defeats the enemies of his salvation, and whoever does not know how to wield it as he should, can easily harm his own soul with it. It should always be remembered that this weapon is often used by our enemies – the devil and his faithful servants, various false teachers. Remember how Satan tempted the Lord: and he referred to the Holy Scriptures: "It is written... In a similar way he tempted the holy ascetics: for example, inducing them to violate the vow of chastity, he pointed to the words of the Scriptures: it is not good for the man alone to be... marriage is honest in all, and the bed is undefiled. All heresies, all false teachings and schisms arose because people did not understand the true meaning of the Holy Scriptures. If a person reads any passage in Scripture and begins to interpret it in his own way, as he pleases, he will err in his interpretation, and there he will separate himself from the unity of the Church of God, he will become a heresiarch. Do I need to give examples? Arius decided to interpret the words of Christ the Savior in his own way: "My Father is greater than Me," and he stumbled in his wisdom, and fell into blasphemous heresy: he called the Son of God, one in essence with the Father, the same creature as the Angels of God, for which he was anathematized at the First Ecumenical Council. And how many such insane, self-willed interpreters of the Holy Scriptures there were, and all of them were stubborn opponents of the Holy Church, sons of perdition! One interpreted the second commandment of God in his own way and became an iconoclast, the other began to explain the words of the Apostle in his own way: "One intercessor between God and man is Christ Jesus," and began to philosophize as if it was no longer necessary to call upon the help of the Mother of God, or the holy angels, or the holy saints of God in prayer; A third read the words of the same Apostle: "By grace thou hast a canopy, through faith," and began to interpret as if good works were not at all required for salvation... Such are the blasphemous false teachings that arise from the fact that people do not take up their own business – they interpret the word of God in their own way, as it comes to their minds, and not in the way the Holy Orthodox Church explains it.