Editor’s Introduction

Forty-four dated addresses, most preached in 1907, in which Father John returns again and again to a single, urgent theme: the coming judgment of God, and the shortness of the time left to prepare for it. He preaches on the great feasts of the church year as they arrive (Pascha, Pentecost, the Transfiguration, the Dormition) but reads each one, characteristically, as a fresh summons to repentance, set against the backdrop of a Russia he saw as sliding toward ruin: the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, the Russo-Japanese War, and what he regarded as a dangerous drift away from the Orthodox faith among the educated classes.

The collection closes with something unlike anything else in it: a contemporary account, written by others, of hierarchs visiting Father John at Kronstadt in his final illness, and a public defense of the aged pastor against a theatrical lampoon that had begun to circulate against him. Read alongside the sermons themselves, it gives a rare, close-up picture of how Father John was regarded by those around him in the last months of his life.