51�Թ�

Hegumen Kirion Machaidze took to to accuse the visitors of "idol worship" and of treating Father Gabriel like a "genie".

The celebrated monastery of Rila possesses a vast estate in the Rilska Planina; its abbot or hegumen owns no spiritual superior but the exarch.

The election of the evil genius to the first place in the insidious movement was well done for the Academy; there would be no failure with him in control; but the poor Hegumen!

In other words, he was seeing things as they were; that bad and good, for instance, were coexistent, one as much a part of the plan of creation as the other; that religion could only regulate and reform; that the end of days would find good men striving with bad men—in brief, that Demedes was performing the role to which his nature and aptitude assigned him, just as the venerable Hegumen, his father, was feebly essaying a counterpart.

"The Brotherhood has elected a new Hegumen," he continued.