CHAPTER IV.
THE VILLAGE PRIEST Priests' Names--Clerical Marriages--The White and the Black Clergy--Why the People do not Respect the Parish Priests--History of the White Clergy--The Parish Priest and the Protestant Pastor--In What Sense the Russian People are Religious--Icons--The Clergy and Popular Education--Ecclesiastical Reform--Premonitory Symptoms of Change--Two Typical Specimens of the Parochial Clergy of the Present Day.
In formal introductions it is customary to pronounce in a more or less inaudible voice the names of the two persons introduced.

Circumstances compel me in the present case to depart from received custom.

The truth is, I do not know the names of the two people whom I wish to bring together! The reader who knows his own name will readily pardon one-half of my ignorance, but he may naturally expect that I should know the name of a man with whom I profess to be acquainted, and with whom I daily held long conversations during a period of several months.

Strange as it may seem, I do not.

During all the time of my sojourn in Ivanofka I never heard him addressed or spoken of otherwise than as "Batushka." Now "Batushka" is not a name at all.