illumined by faith in Christ and faith in humanity.
Even as his physical vitality resisted the onslaught of poverty and imprisonment, so did his moral vitality resist the onslaught of scepticism and rebellion. Again and again he repeated that his death sentence was the greatest blessing of his life; that it made him what he was, both as a man and as a writer. Dostoevsky, in the book in which he records his prison experiences, "The House of the Dead," has no word of bitterness against those who condemned him. It is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to understand such meekness in the face of such oppression; but Dostoevsky was not an Anglo-Saxon—he was a Russian of the Russians. He did not believe in the West. Whereas Turgenev and the Liberals held that the only salvation for Russia was by imitation of European ideas, Dostoevsky believed that Russia had a future of her own, and that this future could only be reached by following her own traditions. He was convinced that it was the shipwrecked and the oppressed, it was the convict and the tramp, who alone possessed the secret of Divine wisdom. It was the meek and the humble who were to inherit the earth.
