The bishop Author:Anton Pavlovich Chekhov Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: " There's great difficulty! " leronim wagged his head. " You can do nothing by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift. The monks who don't underst... more »and argue that you only need to know the life of the saint for whom you are writing the hymn, and to make it harmonize with the other hymns of praise. But that's a mistake, sir. Of course, anyone who writes canticles must know the life of the saint to perfection, to the least trivial detail. To be sure, one must make them harmonize with the other canticles and know where to begin and what to write about. To give you an instance, the first response begins everywhere with ' the chosen' or ' the elect.' . . . The first line must always begin with the ' angel.' In the canticle of praise to Jesus the Most Sweet, if you are interested in the subject, it begins like this: ' Of angels Creator and Lord of all powers!' In the canticle to the Holy Mother of God: ' Of angels the foremost sent down from on high,' to Nikolay, the Wonderworker —' an angel in semblance, though in substance a man,' and so on. Everywhere you begin with the angel. Of course, it would be impossible without making them harmonize, but the lives of the saints and conformity with the others is not what matters; what matters is the beauty and sweetness of it. Everything must be harmonious, brief and complete. There must be in every line softness, graciousness and tenderness; not one word should be harsh or rough or unsuitable. It must be written so that the worshipper may rejoice at heart and weep, while his mind is stirred and he is thrown into a tremor. In the canticle to the Holy Motherare the words: 'Rejoice, O Thou too high for human thought to reach! Rejoice, O Thou too deep for angels' eyes to fathom ! ' In another place in the same canticle: ' Rejoice, O t...« less