cries, so it seems I have not been lacking in respect to you yet." Shatov interrupted, waving his hand.
"Do you remember your expression that 'an atheist can't be a Russian,' that 'an atheist at once ceases to be a Russian'?
Do you remember saying that ?" "Did I ?" Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch questioned him back.
"You ask?
You've forgotten?
And yet that was one of the truest statements of the leading peculiarity of the Russian soul, which you divined.

You can't have forgotten it! I will remind you of something else: you said then that 'a man who was not orthodox could not be Russian.'" "I imagine that's a Slavophil idea." "The Slavophils of to-day disown it.

Nowadays, people have grown cleverer.

But you went further: you believed that Roman Catholicism was not Christianity; you asserted that Rome proclaimed Christ subject to the third temptation of the devil.

Announcing to all the world that Christ without an earthly kingdom cannot hold his ground upon earth, Catholicism by so doing proclaimed Antichrist and ruined the whole Western world.