Editor’s Introduction

Two pieces bound under one cover, from different moments in Father John of Kronstadt’s life. The first, undated, is a blistering sermon on how Russians actually spent the Church’s feast days (drunkenness, brawling, and what he calls the ‘feast of the flesh’ standing in for worship) and on the clergy’s own share of the blame for tolerating it. The second is dated precisely: February 25, 1907, a sermon on the Last Judgment that opens with an earthly courtroom Father John says he had visited himself, then builds toward the far more searching tribunal no one can bribe or appeal.

The second sermon does not end where Father John’s own words end. What follows in the same chapter, unmarked as a separate piece by the source page itself, is a later tribute by a different writer, signed V. Pustoshkin, recalling Father John after his death in 1908 and citing the Emperor’s rescript of January 1909 that named him a righteous man. It reads Kronstadt’s 1907 words on judgment back into his own life, cautiously stopping short of the icons, akathists, and candle-lighting the Church had not yet authorized. The two pieces are kept together here exactly as the source presents them, with the seam marked in the finish notes rather than in the text itself.