“…We value the faith of our people. This faith is cherished even by many of those Russians who themselves do not go to church to pray or go rarely, more out of national feeling than out of faith.Can't we see the connecting thread? A peasant goes to Optina Pustyn or Tikhonov, or to Kyiv, to the Pechersk Lavra, or to Solovki. What does he think there, what does he see, what does he learn? Where did all this come from? Is it not from the East?.. Is it not from the Greeks? Is it not in the hands of the Greeks to this day Jerusalem, Athos, Sinai? Is it not to Tsargrad, as the center of general church influence and the center of church administration, that all these Holy Places gravitate? .. "