Status Updates From Отец Сергий (Russian Edition)

The less importance he attached to the opinion of men the more did he feel the presence of God within him.

I know it should not be like that, but I lack real religious feeling.

He woke up immediately and began not to dream but to remember.

‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Marie, you are a devil!’
‘Oh, perhaps. What does it matter?’
And embracing him she sat down with him on the bed.

but he could not decide what was best—to remain or to escape. At first he was in doubt, but afterwards this indecision passed. He submitted to custom and yielded to the devil, . . .

‘Yes, I will go to her, but like the Saint who laid one hand on the adulteress and thrust his other into the brazier.

Their eyes met with instant recognition: not that they had ever known one another, they had never met before, but by the look they exchanged they—and he particularly—felt that they knew and understood one another. After that glance to imagine her to be a devil and not a simple, kindly, sweet, timid woman, was impossible.

Yes—it is a woman’s voice. And a tender, timid, pleasant voice.

Can it be true, as I have read in the Lives of the Saints, that the devil takes on the form of a woman?

Why does the whole world, with all its delights, exist if it is sinful and must be renounced?

His life in solitude was hard . . . an inner conflict he had not at all anticipated. The sources of that conflict were two: doubts, and the lust of the flesh. And these two enemies always appeared together. It seemed to him that they were two foes, but in reality they were one and the same. As soon as doubt was gone so was the lustful desire. But thinking them to be two different fiends he fought them separately.

His disillusionment with Mary, whom he had thought of angelic purity, and his sense of injury, were so strong that they brought him to despair, and the despair led him—to what? To God, to his childhood's faith which had never been destroyed in him.