MIRACLES.
Yet the gift of miracles is greater than the gift of sacrifice. The
Black Clergy stand out for miracles; not in a mystical sense, but in a
natural sense; not only in times long past, but in the present hour;
not only in the dark and in obscure hamlets, but in populous places
and in the light of day.
At Kief a friend drives me out to the caves of Anton and Feodosie,
where we find some men and women standing by the gates, expecting the
father who keeps the keys to bring them and unlock the doors. As these
living pilgrims occupy us more than the dead anchorets, we join this
party, pay our five kopecks, light our tapers, and descend with them
the rocky stairs into the vault. Candle in hand, an aged monk goes
forward, muttering in the gloom; stopping for an instant, here and
there, to show us, lying on a ledge of rock, some coffin muffled in a
pall. We thread a mile of lanes, saluting saint on saint, and twice or
thrice we come into dwarf chapels, in each of which a lamp burns dimly
before a shrine. The women kneel; the men cross themselves and pray.
Moving forward in the dark, we come upon a niche in the wall, covered
by a curtain and a glass door, on the ledge of which stands a silver
dish, a little water, and a human skull. Our pilgrims cross themselves
and mutter a voiceless prayer, while the aged monk lays down his taper
and unlocks the door. A woman sinks on her knees before the niche,
turns up her face, and shuts her eyes, while the father, dipping a
quill into the water, drops a little of the fluid on her eyelids. One
by one, each pilgrim undergoes this rite; and then, on rising from his
knees, lays down an offering of a few kopecks on the ledge of rock.
"What does this ceremony mean?" I ask the father. "Mean?" says he: "a
mystery--a miracle! This skull is the relic of a holy man whose eye
had suffered from a blow. He called upon the Most Pure Mother of God;
she heard his cry of pain; and in her pity she cured him of his
wound."
"What is the name of that holy man?"--"We do not know."
"When did he live and die?"--"We do not know."
"Was he a monk of Kief?"--"He was; and after he died his skull was
kept, because his fame was great, and every one with pain in his eyes
came hither to obtain relief."
Not one of our fellow-pilgrims has sore eyes; but who, as the father
urges, knows what the morrow may have in store? Bad eyes may come; and
who would not like to insure himself forever against pain and
blindness at the cost of five kopecks?
Such miracles are performed by the bones of saints in cities less holy
and old than Kief.
Seraphim, a merchant of Kursk, abandoned his wife, his children, and
his shop, to become a monk. Wandering to the cloister called the
Desert of Sarof, in the province of Tambof, he dug for himself a hole
in the ground, in which he lay down and slept. Some robbers came to
his cave, where they beat and searched him; but, on finding his
pockets empty, they knew that he must be a holy man. From that lucky
day his fame spread rapidly abroad; and people came to see him from
far and near; bringing presents of bread, of raiment, and of money;
all of which he took into his cave, and doled out afterwards to the
poor. A second window had to be cut into his cell; at one he received
gifts, at the other he dispensed them. His desert became a populous
place, and the Convent of Sarof grew into vast repute.
Seraphim founded a second desert for women, ten miles distant from his
own. A gentleman gave him a piece of ground; merchants sent him money;
for his favor was by that time reckoned as of higher value than house
and land. Lovely and wealthy women drove to see him, and to stay with
him; entering into the desert which he formed for them, and living
apart from the world, without taking on their heads the burden of
conventual vows. At length a miracle was announced. A lamp which hung
in front of a picture of the Virgin died out while Seraphim was
kneeling on the ground; the chapel grew dark and the face of the
Virgin faint; the pilgrims were much alarmed; when, to the surprise of
every one who saw it, a light came out from the picture and re-lit the
lamp! A second miracle soon followed. One day, a crowd of poor people
came to the desert for bread, when Seraphim had little in his cell to
give. Counting his loaves, he saw that he had only two; and how was he
to divide two loaves among all those hungry folk? He lifted up his
voice--and lo! not two, but twenty loaves were standing on his board.
From that time wonders were reported every year from Sarof; cures of
all kinds; and the court in front of Seraphim's cell was thronged by
the lame and blind, the deaf and dumb, by day and night.
Seraphim died in 1833; yet miracles are said to be effected at his
tomb to this very hour. Already called a saint, the people ask his
canonization from the Church. Every new Emperor makes a saint; as in
Turkey every new Sultan builds a mosque; and Seraphim is fixed upon by
the public voice as the man whom Alexander the Third will have to make
a saint.
One Motovilof, a landowner in the province of Penza, lame, unable to
walk, applied for help to Seraphim, who promised the invalid, on
conditions, a certain cure. Motovilof was to become a friend of Sarof;
a supporter of the female desert. Yielding to these terms, he was told
to go down to Voronej, and to make his reverence at the shrine of
Metrofanes, a local saint, on which he would find himself free from
pain. Motovilof went to Voronej, and came back cured. With grateful
heart he gave Seraphim a patch of land for his female desert; and
then, being busy with his affairs, he gradually forgot his pilgrimage
and his miraculous cure. The pain came back into his leg; he could
hardly walk; and not until he sent a supply of bread and clothes to
Seraphim was he restored in health. Not once, but many times, the
worldly man was warned to keep his pledge; a journey to the desert
became a habit of his life; until he fell into love for one of
Seraphim's fair penitents, and taking her home from her refuge, made
that recluse his wife.
More noticeable still is the story of Tikhon, sometime Bishop of
Voronej, now a recognized saint of the Orthodox Church. Tikhon is the
official saint of the present reign; the living Emperor's contribution
to the heavenly ranks.
Timothy Sokolof, son of a poor reader in a village church, was born
(in 1724) in that province of Novgorod which has given to Russia most
of her popular saints. The reader's family was large, his income
small, and Timothy was sent to work on a neighbor's farm. Toiling in
the fields by day, in the sheds by night; sleeping little, eating
less; he yet contrived to learn how to read and write. Sent from this
farm to a school, just opened in Novgorod, he toiled so patiently at
his tasks, and made such progress in his studies, that on finishing
his course he was appointed master of the school.
His heart was not in this work of teaching. From his cradle he had
been fond of singing hymns and hearing mass, of being left alone with
his books and thoughts, of flying from the face of man and the
allurements of the world. A vision shaped for him his future course.
"When I was yet a teacher in the school," he said to a friend in after
life, "I sat up whole nights, reading and thinking. Once, when I was
sitting up in May, the air being very soft, the sky very bright, I
left my cell, and stood under the starry dome, admiring the lights,
and thinking of our eternal life. Heaven opened to my sight--a vision
such as human words can never paint! My heart was filled with joy, and
from that hour I felt a passionate longing to quit the world."
A few years after he took the cowl and changed the name of Timothy for
Tikhon, he was raised from his humble cell to the episcopal bench;
first in Novgorod, afterwards at Voronej; the second a missionary see;
the province of Voronej lying close to the Don Kozak country and the
Tartar steppe.
The people of this district were lawless tribes; Kozaks, Kalmuks,
Malo-Russ; a tipsy, idle, vagabond crew; the clergy worse, it may be,
than their flocks. Voronej had no schools; the popes could hardly
read; the services were badly sung and said. All classes of the people
lived in sin. Tikhon began a patient wrestle with these disorders.
Opening with the priests, and with the schools, he put an end to
flogging in the seminaries; in order, as he said, to raise the
standing of a priest, and cause the student to respect himself. This
change was but a sign of things to come. By easy steps he won his
clergy to live like priests; to drink less, to pray more; and
generally to act as ministers of God. In two years he purged the
schools and purified the Church.
No less care was given to lay disorders. Often he had to be plain in
speech; but such was the reverence felt for him by burgher and peasant
that no one dared to disregard his voice. "You must do so, if Tikhon
tells you," they would say to each other; "if not, he will complain of
you to God." He dressed in a coarse robe; he ate plain food; he sent
the wine untouched from his table to the sick. He was the poor man's
friend; and only waited on the rich when he found no wretched ones at
his gates. The power of Tikhon lay in his faultless life, in his
tender tones, and in his loving heart. "Want of love," he used to
urge, "is the cause of all our misery; had we more love for our
brothers, pain and grief would be more easy to bear; love soothes away
all grief and pain."
Two years in Novgorod, five years in Voronej, he spent in these
gracious labors, till the longing of his heart for solitude grew too
strong. Laying down his mitre, he retired from his palace in Voronej
to the convent of Zadonsk, a little town on the river Don, where he
gave up his time to writing tracts and visiting the poor. These labors
were of highest use; for Tikhon was among the first (if not the first
of all) to write in favor of the serf. Fifteen volumes of his works
are printed; fifteen more are said to lie in manuscript; and some of
these works have gone through fifty editions from the Russian press.
Tikhon's great merit as a writer lies in the fact that he foresaw,
prepared, and urged emancipation of the serfs.
For fifteen years he lived the life of a holy man. As a friend of
serfs, he one day went to the house of a prince, in the district of
Voronej, to point out some wrong which they were suffering on his
estate, and to beg him, for the sake of Jesus and Mary, to be tender
with the poor. The prince got angry with his guest for putting the
thing so plainly into words; and in the midst of some sharp speech
between them, struck him in the face. Tikhon rose up and left the
house; but when he had walked some time, he began to see that he--no
less than his host--was in the wrong. This man, he said to himself,
has done a deed of which, on cooling down, he will feel ashamed. Who
has caused him to do that wrong? "It was my doing," sighed the
reprover, turning on his heel, and going straight back into the house.
Falling at the prince's feet, Tikhon craved his pardon for having
stirred him into wrath, and caused him to commit a sin. The man was so
astonished, that he knelt down by the monk, and, kissing his hands,
implored his forgiveness and his benediction. From that hour, it is
said, the prince was another man; noticeable through all the province
of Voronej for his kindness to the serfs.
Tikhon lived into his eightieth year. Before he passed away, he told
the brethren of his convent he would live until such a day and then
depart. He died, as he had told them he should die--on the day
foreseen, and in the midst of his weeping friends. From the day of his
funeral, his shrine in Zadonsk was visited by an ever-increasing
crush; for cures of many kinds were wrought; the sick recovered, the
lame walked home, the blind saw, the crooked became straight. A
thousand voices claimed the canonization of this friend of serfs;
until the reigning emperor, struck by this appeal, invited the Holy
Governing Synod to conduct the inquiries which precede the
canonization of a Russian saint.
The commission sat; the miracles were proved; and then the tomb was
opened. Out from the coffin came a scent of flowers; the flesh was
pure and sweet; and the act of canonization was decreed and signed in
1861, the emancipation year. Tikhon of Zadonsk is the emancipation
saint.
Yet, according to the Black Clergy, the newest and the greatest
miracle of modern times is the Virgin's defense of Solovetsk against
the Anglo-French squadron in 1854.
The wardrobe of Solovetsk contains the chief treasures of the
cloister; old charters and letters; original grants of lands; the
rescript of Peter; manuscript lives of Savatie and Zosima;
service-books, richly bound in golden plates; Pojarski's sword; cups,
lamps, crosses, candlesticks in gold and silver; but the treasure of
treasures is the evidence of that stupendous miracle wrought by the
Most Pure Mother of God.
On the centre stand, under a glass case, strongly locked, lie an
English shell and two round-shot. They are carefully inscribed. A
reliquary in a closet holds a dozen bits of brass, the rent fusees of
exploded shells. A number of prints are sold to the devout, in which
the English gun-boats are moored under the convent wall, so near that
men might easily have leaped on shore. Among this mass of evidence is
a new and splendid ornamental cup; the gift of Russia to Solovetsk--in
memory of the day when human help had failed, and "the convent that
endureth forever" was saved by the Virgin Mother of God.
A scoffer here and there may smile. "Savatie! Zosima!" laughed a
Russian cynic in my face; "you English made the fortune of these
saints. How so? You see a peasant has but two notions in his pate--the
Empire and the Church; a power of the flesh and a power of the spirit.
Now, see what you have done. You wage war upon us; you send your
fleets into the Black Sea and into the White Sea; in the first to
fight against the Empire, in the second to fight against the Church.
In one sea, you win; in the other sea, you lose. Sevastopol falls to
your arms; while Solovetsk drives away your ships. The arm of the
spirit is seen to be stronger than the arm of flesh. What then?
'Heaven,' says the rustic to his neighbor, as they dawdle home from
church, 'is mightier than the Tsar.' For fifty years to come our
superstitions will lie on English heads!"
The tale of that miracle, told me on the spot, will sound in some ears
like a piece of high comedy, in others like a chapter from some
ancient and forgotten book. A dry dispatch from Admiral Ommanney
contains the little that we know of our "Operations in the White Sea;"
the next Chapter gives the story, as they tell it on the other side.