"Father, I'm sorry!"

Fr. John lifted him up and calmed him down:

"I am not angry with you," he said, "although I saw that you had bad thoughts then. You did not offend me, but my poor, my beggars... And God is with them.

From that day on, the priest again began to go to Petrov's shop for change, and the latter's trade quickly recovered and flourished as before.

Rich people donated huge amounts of money to the priest for charity. True, the sums coming from all over Russia to Fr. John can only be judged approximately – he immediately distributed everything he received to the needy. But even according to the minimum calculation, at least one million rubles a year passed through his hands (in those days it was a huge amount!).

With this money, Fr. John fed a thousand beggars every day, and set up a "House of Industriousness" in Kronstadt, which included a church, a school, an orphanage, and workshops; founded a convent in his native village of Sura and erected a large stone church there, and built a convent in St. Petersburg.

At the beginning of his priesthood, the priest's wife often reproached him for completely forgetting his family and home, but Father John answered briefly: "I am a priest, what is there to do? This means that there is nothing to say – I belong not to myself, but to others."

And here is what one of Father John's contemporaries writes.

As a page, I went to Father John in Kronstadt together with a friend. When we boarded the steamer in Oranienbaum, it turned out that Father John was returning with the same steamer, to whom we immediately approached and had the good fortune to talk with him all the way and learn from his instructions.

When the steamer docked at Kronstadt, it turned out that Father John was already waiting there. In the street adjacent to the pier, beggars stood in two rows in rows, about two hundred people. Father John, having come ashore, approached them and began to give them alms. At the same time, we were fortunate enough to be eyewitnesses to the clairvoyance of Father John. One of the passengers near us, a young intellectual of a rather cheeky type, whispered to his neighbor, a student, in a low voice, pointing to Father John, who was handing out money at the other end of the street: "Encouragement of parasitism!" When Father John finished handing out, he returned to the pier, where those young people were still standing, waiting for a cabman, and said, addressing them: "We must all be merciful to the poor, for it is written in the Scriptures: blessed is he who looks upon the poor and the needy, in the day of death the Lord will deliver him, but we, priests, are obliged to take care of the poor even more, since it is said there, "The beggar is left to eat you!"