I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth. But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught.

Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them, but had merely relied on what I was taught and on what was professed by the grown-up people around me, and that reliance was very unstable.

I remember that before I was twelve years old, a boy from our neighboring school told us that at their school they had made a discovery: there is no God, and all that was taught us was a mere invention.

I was eighteen when I left the university, and had already completely discarded religious observances: I no longer prayed and no longer went to church on my own accord.

I put my faith in progress and perfection. Why and what for, I could not say. I tried to excel physically, intellectually, morally. But whenever I attempted to express my deepest desires—to be morally good—I met with contempt and ridicule; but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged.

Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs are repeated more and more often and coalesce into a period of continuous suffering.

The suffering increases, and before the sick man can look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has become more important to him than anything else in the world—it is death!

That is what happened to me. I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of life, in one way or another.

It was not that I wanted to kill myself. The force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, and more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my former aspiration to live, only it impelled me in an opposite direction.

And all this was happening to me at a time when I had on all sides what seemed to be complete happiness: I had a good, loving, and beloved wife, fine children, and a large estate which without much effort on my part increased and grew. I was more respected by my relatives and acquaintances than I had ever been; I was praised by strangers, and without any self-deception could consider that my name was famous.

Yet I could not live. And I hid away a rope from myself lest I should hang myself from the beam of the room where I undressed alone every night, and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life.

There is an ancient Eastern fable about a traveler who is surprised in the desert by an enraged wild beast. Fleeing from the beast, the traveler leaps into a dry well, but at the bottom he sees a dragon with open jaws waiting to devour him.

The unhappy man, not daring to climb out lest he be destroyed by the beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom lest he be devoured by the dragon, catches hold of a wild shrub growing in a crack in the wall of the well and clings to it.

His hands grow weak and he feels he must soon perish, but still he holds on, and he sees two mice, one black and one white, evenly circling the bush on which he hangs, gnawing at its roots.

The traveler looks and knows that soon the shrub will give way and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. But while he is hanging there he looks around and sees drops of honey on the leaves of the shrub, and he reaches out with his tongue and licks them.

So I hung on the bough of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably waiting for me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment.

And I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey gave me no pleasure, and the white and black mice—day and night—gnawed at the branch by which I held on.

I remembered that I only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve in Him, and I die.

What is this animation and dying? Why, He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live are one and the same thing. God is life.

'Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.' And more powerfully than ever before everything within and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me.

And I was saved from suicide. When this change occurred in me I cannot say. Just as the life-force in me had been destroyed gradually and unconsciously, so the life-force returned to me gradually and unconsciously.

And I returned to the belief in that Will which produced me and desires something of me. I understood that the meaning of life is not to be found in the vanity of the wealthy, but in the labor of the simple, loving human heart.