It looks into the future with eyes that see visions, and
stretches forward to that future with hands that are creative; an
institution with no past but only a present and an idea, not acting by
precedent or tradition but taking its inspiration straight from life's
sources.
II
It will be profitable to describe the monastery just as I saw it and
felt it to be, on the occasion of my arrival there after five hundred
miles tramping in the autumn of 1911. I had overtaken many pilgrims
journeying thither, and the nearer I approached the more became their
numbers. There were many on foot and many in carts and coaches.
Multi-coloured diligences were packed with people and luggage--the
people often more miscellaneously packed than the luggage, clinging
on behind, squashed in the middle, sprawling on the top. The drivers
looked superb though dressed in thousand-times-mended black coats, the
post-boys tootled on their horns, and the passengers sang or shouted
to the music of accordions. Of course not all those in the coaches
were pilgrims religiously inclined; many were holiday seekers out for
the day. The gates of Novy Afon are open to all, even to the Mahometan
or the Pagan. It was a beautiful cloudless morning when I arrived at
this most wonderful monastery in the Russian world--a cluster of white
churches on a hill, a swarm of factories and workshops, cedar avenues,
orchards, vineyards, and, above all, tree-covered mountains crowned by
grey towers and ancient ruins, the whole looking out on the far sea.
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