United States or French Polynesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Alyosha had unquestioning faith in the miraculous power of the elder, just as he had unquestioning faith in the story of the coffin that flew out of the church. He saw many who came with sick children or relatives and besought the elder to lay hands on them and to pray over them, return shortly aftersome the next dayand, falling in tears at the elder’s feet, thank him for healing their sick.

Fyodor Pavlovitch did not understand a word of it, and he could not even put it sensibly, for on this occasion no one had been kneeling and confessing aloud in the elder’s cell, so that he could not have seen anything of the kind. He was only speaking from confused memory of old slanders.

The conviction that after his death the elder would bring extraordinary glory to the monastery was even stronger in Alyosha than in any one there, and, of late, a kind of deep flame of inner ecstasy burnt more and more strongly in his heart. He was not at all troubled at this elder’s standing as a solitary example before him. “No matter. He is holy.

He had a high opinion of his own insight, a weakness excusable in him as he was fifty, an age at which a clever man of the world of established position can hardly help taking himself rather seriously. At the first moment he did not like Zossima. There was, indeed, something in the elder’s face which many people besides Miüsov might not have liked.

When it was fully daylight, some people began bringing their sick, in most cases children, with them from the townas though they had been waiting expressly for this moment to do so, evidently persuaded that the dead elder’s remains had a power of healing, which would be immediately made manifest in accordance with their faith.

Fyodor Pavlovitch had much to think of, but never had his heart been steeped in such voluptuous hopes. This time he could say almost certainly that she would come! When with an anxious and aching heart Alyosha went into his elder’s cell, he stood still almost astonished.