The smooth flow of the Orthodox service presupposes that each visitor chooses for himself the series of images that is closer to his current spiritual needs. They do not squeeze a tear out of him and do not vomit delight. He plunges into the slowly flowing river of meanings and from hearing to his heart conducts those streams that he personally needs now. The rules of Orthodox church prayer allow you not to listen to the entire course of church readings – if one thought meets your heart's feeling, you can "lag behind" the course of the service, stay alone with this thought in your prayer, and then return to common prayer.

On the contrary, at a Protestant meeting, there is constant emotional pressure on the audience. The one who is now reading his prayer, with breaths, intonations, gestures, squeezes out exactly the emotion that seems to him to be the most important now. Everyone has to participate in the feelings of the pastor or the pronouncer of this prayer.

In a Protestant prayer house, it seems to me, it is much more difficult to fulfill a desire that is familiar to many, many people – to go to a weekday service for ten minutes, to stand discreetly and quietly, to collect one's thoughts, to be in church one-on-one with God, to pray for one's own and just as imperceptibly to leave. The smooth and discreet flow of the everyday Orthodox service does not prevent a person from turning directly to God with his thoughts. Reading, singing, Church Slavonic recitative create a general mood, and what exactly in this common aspiration to God this or that person expresses from his heart depends only on him. Even the fact that the language of our services is not very clear – even this can help the birth of personal prayer. If I go to church for five minutes, and I still don't understand what the reader is reading, then I will pray in my own words and for my own. And the fact that it is quieter here than outside, and quieter not only physically, but also spiritually, will help me to look better into myself... And in Protestant churches, hymns are too loud, the words of prayers are too loud and insistent, the sermons are too imperative and self-confident. There is a minute of silent prayer – but if you cross the threshold at the wrong time, then it will be difficult to maintain your silence. Praying to God on our own behalf and regardless of what is happening in the congregation is much more difficult here.

They say that Orthodox Christians pray memorized from a book, and Protestants from the heart, in their own words. But, strange as it may seem, it is precisely the "words of others" that leave much more freedom for a person to build his own prayer than "improvisation." The canonical prayer of the priest in the church protects the prayer work of others. A priest can be untalented, insincere, and unspiritual. But he doesn't say his own words! And therefore, his speech is still both spiritual and talented! He speaks words that have been filtered out over millennia. A Protestant pastor can have the same unattractive qualities. His parishioners, however, in this case are doomed to listen to his attempts at "inspired prayer."

The Orthodox "rite" makes the priest inconspicuous. The same intonation, the same words and the same melodies are sung by priests of the most diverse spiritual merits. The Orthodox clergyman does not focus his attention on himself. It is not so much that he conducts the service, as the service conducts him. On the contrary, the Protestant preacher is forced to put himself in the center of attention. He is forced to speak with affectation, in an extremely strained voice, gesticulating strongly, turning from side to side, repeating in different ways common phrases used by everyone.

They say that an Orthodox simply reads a book, "reads", and does not pray. According to my observations, there is much less prayer in the public prayer proclamations of Protestants. Look closely at a person who prays loudly in the presence of other people. After all, he does not think "to God" – but about how to say "about God" better. He thinks not so much about his vital spiritual needs, but about how to express himself more effectively in the presence of his fellows. He has no time to pray – he "creates", painfully gives birth to impromptu[197].

In general, "all the persecutors of the traditional rite do not notice that in reality they introduce only ... A new rite. Thus, Protestantism, having raised its bold hand against the age-old and aesthetically beautiful Catholic rite, only replaced it with another, poor and dry, prosaic rite, within which, however, it is no less possible to be an Old Believer than in the most magnificent ritual. Thus our sectarians replace the divine beauty of the Orthodox liturgics with boring and talentless 'psalms', with a dry Protestant rite."[198]

Here is a report on the Baptist rite of baptism: "At the end of the choir singing, Brother A. N. Karpov invites the congregation to sing in common singing a cheerful, joyful hymn No 306 from the Collection of Spiritual Songs, which the faithful sing with a special spiritual uplift: "I am at the shore of the burial, at the grave of the water, as a sacrifice to God without a doubt I give myself with all my soul. Oh, receive me, O Saviour, into Thy faithful Church; I believe, my Redeemer, in Thy Blood shed"... The clock struck 7. The presbyter-baptizer approaches the baptistery filled with water and descends into it by the steps. Before beginning the baptism, he performs a brief prayer in his mind in the baptistery, chest-deep in water, after which, to the accompaniment of the choir, which sings the hymn "That wondrous tidings I firmly believe," one by one the baptized approach the baptistery... Throughout the baptismal process, the choir sings the hymn "That Wonderful Tidings I Firmly Believe," repeating each verse several times until all forty have been baptized. The baptism is over. After thanking the Lord, brother A. N. Karpov also went to change clothes. At the pulpit at that time there was brother Y. I. Zhidkov, who proposed to sing hymns No 113 and No 229 from the Collection of Spiritual Songs in common singing. After the singing of the choir, Brother Y. I. Zhidkov proposes to sing another hymn in common singing: "How Happy I Am" (Collection, No 305), which the faithful sing with great enthusiasm. "By faith in Him I was baptized, rejecting sin and the power of the flesh," these words are sung with a particularly joyful feeling by the newly baptized. During the singing, voluntary donations are collected for the needs of the church: the maintenance of the premises, heating, lighting, repairs, the purchase of wine for the breaking of bread, the publication of the magazine "Bratsky Vestnik", for various business trips of the brothers and the salaries of both church ministers and other employees working in the Moscow community and in the All-Union Library"[199]. And what is freer, deeper, more humane, more poetic than the Orthodox rite of baptism?

According to Protestants, the Orthodox revere man-made, human shrines too much, which for them obscure the Living God. But it is the Protestants who gain faith in creation—for them, the Word of God is the Bible. The Logos was incarnated not so much in the flesh of Jesus as in the lines of the book. An Orthodox person will not say that God lives in an icon or that God is an icon. A Protestant is ready to say this about the Bible. When talking to Protestants, the most difficult answer to the question is what Christ left to people after His Ascension. They insist on repeating the Bible. I try to explain to them that Christ left Himself to us, left His Spirit in the Body of His Church, but my interlocutors stand their ground to the last opportunity: the Savior has left us books, books, we will live by books, we will be guided by books, the Revelation of God is contained for us in the book...

Protestants also accuse the Orthodox of ritualism, of performing actions the meaning of which the parishioners do not understand. But at least we know that there is a meaning in our sacraments and rites, and — as far as the sacraments allow explanations — we try to explain them to the people. But Protestants commit a number of actions, the meaning of which is basically unclear to them. For example, the breaking of bread, ordination and baptism.

These actions, as sacred and necessary in the life of the Church, are prescribed by the authority of Scripture. But why? Protestants, according to their theologians, do not have sacraments. This means that there are just symbols, just rituals. "A rite can be called an external ritual established by Christ in order to be performed in the Church as a visible sign of the saving truth of the Christian faith. Neither in baptism nor in the Lord's Supper is there any special manifestation of grace"[200]. According to the Baptists (a community that took its name from baptism!), "baptism is not considered a sacrament, but a rite symbolizing the initiation (acceptance) of a person into the church, the washing away of sins, the promise of a good conscience to God and obedience to Him" [201].

But if someone simply wants to promise God his conscience, he can do it himself, at home, without witnesses: simply and in silence turning to the Creator. And even in the public sphere, there are many "rites of acceptance" and many ways of taking an oath ("promise of conscience"). If baptism is reduced to an oath, if "baptism is our public witness before men and before God,"[202] then how does it differ from the oath of a young pioneer: "I, in the presence of my fellows, solemnly promise and swear wholeheartedly to serve the ideas of the New Testament..."? Except that the "comrades" are different... Why baptize in water? Why does the entrance to the Christian community lie precisely through the waters of baptism? Why ordain priests? Maybe it is enough just to hand them the appropriate certificates? Why commune with bread and wine? Why "remember" Christ's suffering with food? [203]. You can remember the sufferings of Christ by watching a video.

A Protestant will indignantly retort, "But we baptize, ordain, and celebrate the Supper because Christ has ordained it!" Is there any mystical significance to these actions? If you do them simply because you have been ordered to do so, and you cannot explain to yourself the meaning of what you are doing, then it is you who can be accused of the most fanatical ritualism.

There is, however, something among Protestants that I sincerely envy. This is their name, trade mark (English "trademark, brand name" - Ed.). I would also like to call myself a "Protestant." This is a very beautiful, courageous word, consonant with the modern fashion for dissidence. But where is there more protest and rebellion – in modern Protestantism or in modern Orthodoxy? Any person notices in Orthodoxy (condemning or admiring) an amazing reluctance to bend under the wind of modernity and rebuild according to the requirements of newspapers and fashions. Orthodoxy is a protest that has carried through twenty centuries the ability to bold modernity. It is impossible to accuse Orthodoxy of collaborationism, opportunism, and worldliness at the same time, and at the same time to scold it for its inability and unwillingness to modernize. I know that among those priests and Orthodox intellectuals who defend the Church Slavonic language, many feel in the denial of the Russian language precisely the aesthetics of protest. There was its own beauty in pre-reform Catholicism. There was a beauty in the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, in the age of liberalism, Catholics adopted the outrageous dogma of papal infallibility. It is precisely because it is outrageous that it is beautiful. But today they have lost their admirable stubbornness, their certainty that they are standing on the rock of Peter and on the rock of salvation, and they have become less interesting.