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official from the town, known to be a man of great piety.
But he only repeated aloud what the monks had long been
whispering. They had long before formulated this damning
conclusion, and the worst of it was that a sort of triumphant
satisfaction at that conclusion became more and more ap-
parent every moment. Soon they began to lay aside even
external decorum and almost seemed to feel they had a sort
of right to discard it.
‘And for what reason can this have happened,’ some of
the monks said, at first with a show of regret; ‘he had a small
frame and his flesh was dried up on his bones, what was
there to decay?’
‘It must be a sign from heaven,’ others hastened to add,
and their opinion was adopted at once without protest. For
it was pointed out, too, that if the decomposition had been
natural, as in the case of every dead sinner, it would have
been apparent later, after a lapse of at least twenty-four
hours, but this premature corruption ‘was in excess of na-
ture,’ and so the finger of God was evident. It was meant for
a sign. This conclusion seemed irresistible.
Gentle Father Iosif, the librarian, a great favourite of
the dead man’s, tried to reply to some of the evil speakers
that ‘this is not held everywhere alike,’ and that the incor-
ruptibility of the bodies of the just was not a dogma of the
Orthodox Church, but only an opinion, and that even in the
most Orthodox regions, at Athos for instance, they were not
greatly confounded by the smell of corruption, and there
the chief sign of the glorification of the saved was not bodily
incorruptibility, but the colour of the bones when the bod-