In the Russia of my childhood and youth, at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth, religious attitudes and practices in society as a whole were still those inherited through centuries of tradition in the Russian Orthodox Church. Traditional observances had not yet, as they were soon to be, been widely questioned or neglected. Most orthodox Russians tried to live according to the rules of the Church; but I believe that the merchant class, which included my family, followed established religious practices more strictly than other laymen. Perhaps this was because they were more traditional-minded than the bureaucracy or the aristocracy.