scribes, but not those Jewish scribes who, together with the Pharisees, formed a party hostile to Him, but scribes who had been taught the Kingdom of Heaven. The Jewish scribes knew only

the old, Old Testament prophecy about the coming of the Messiah, and even then they did not understand it; but the scribe, who has been taught by the preaching of Christ, who knows and

the old prophecy, and

the new teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven will use both, and just as a householder brings out of his treasury not only the new, but also the old, according to need, so they, preaching, will use not only His teaching, but also the Old Testament prophecies about Him.

The Jews were waiting for the Messiah as an invincible conquering king who would conquer the whole world and reign forever. The true Messiah—Christ, the Son of God—came and began to preach His teaching. But the Pharisees, scribes, high priests, and in general the leaders of the Jewish people did not want to hear this sermon and deliberately turned a blind eye to all the deeds done by Jesus. They would neither listen nor see that which proved the falsity of their doctrine and the divinity of the coming Messiah, whose kingdom is not of this world; they did not want to because their hearts had become hardened under the influence of obsessive thoughts about the Messiah-conqueror.

The Apostle Paul preached about the risen Christ before the Areopagus in Athens; but when he came to the very event of the Resurrection, some members of the Areopagus mocked him, and others said: "Of this we will hear thee at another time" (Acts 17:32). They did not listen to the preacher because their hearts were hardened by the same obsessive thought about the impossibility of the resurrection of the dead.

So it is in our time: our intelligentsia (of course, not all of them), who know neither Jesus Christ nor His Gospel, who have left the childish faith brought there in secondary school and replaced it with fashionable atheism, as a sign of a supposedly higher intellectual development, do not even want to hear about Christ the God-Man, the Son of God. Having read Büchner, Renan, Strauss, Haeckel, our intellectuals have become so hypnotized by their false teachings that it is very, very difficult to bring them out of this hypnotic sleep. An unbelieving student, exhausted by the consciousness of the aimlessness and meaninglessness of human life, wrote to me about his passionate desire to know the meaning of life; I pointed out to him the necessity of studying the gospel and the person of Jesus Christ in order to know the meaning of life, and he told me that the doubts deeply rooted in his soul positively prevented him from even unfolding the gospel. Let me give you another example. In Nice, I often had the opportunity to meet with one of my acquaintances, a doctor, an elderly man. Apparently, he was also worried about the question: why do we live? He was looking for an answer to this question and took up the reading of the Gospel. But the spirit of denial and doubt, which had taken possession of him already at school, decisively prevented him from studying the Gospel