Now of course many missionaries were themselves parish priests who took on additional leadership in this area. And the vast majority of diocesan missionaries, unlike Bogoliubov, were themselves ordained clergymen. Still, as a group, the missionaries had a difficult position in the Church. The 1888 mission rules had envisioned a corps of diocesan missionaries composed of priests with theological academy or seminary diplomas, paid out of diocesan funds. They would be assisted by parish priests appointed as local missionaries and by enthusiastic and knowledgeable lay volunteers [22]. In fact, although three quarters of the diocesan missionaries at the 1897 missionary congress in Kazan' were priests, a significant minority, including Bogoliubov, who represented Tambov diocese, were lay people who had chosen to become full-time missionaries. And unlike the overwhelming majority of priests, almost forty percent of them - and every single non-ordained diocesan missionary - held higher degrees [23]. In their discussion of the methods of their work at the congress, and in Missionerskoe Obozrienie in the previous months, they would emphasize themes Bogoliubov addressed in his memoir: the ill-defined nature of their positions in their various dioceses, the fact that they often were employed by church brotherhoods that made decisions about their work without ever consulting them, that they lacked pension funds, and that they were often resented by local priests [24]. And, as did Bogoliubov, they added their voice to the campaign for improved conditions for parish priests, in the belief that this was essential to improving the atmosphere in Orthodox parishes across the country and giving priests the time and peace of mind they needed for religious education measures [25].

Bogoliubov's initial encounters with the village also forced him to re-think broader cultural assumptions he had gleaned from his academic education. He had not understood, he realized, "the intense struggle that was taking place in the depths of the people around our religious beliefs." His seminary education had prepared him to think in terms of the ideas of N.Ia. Danilevskii. In his famous book, Russia and Europe, once described as the "catechism or codex of Slavophilism," Danilevskii had contrasted the materialist, corrupt, and factionalized Romano-Germanic civilization with the organic, Slavic-Orthodox culture of Russia, and predicted that the latter would one day come to dominate - or rather save - civilization. Bogoliubov had expected that Orthodoxy would be essential, native, and inalienable for the Russian peasant. Yet how was it, he wondered, "that many Russian people were leaving their natural element [stikhiia] and consciously and with conviction accepting a religious faith in the form of shtundism - the Baptist and Molokan faiths, where precisely personal, individual interests, [and] the personal, individual conscience are placed at the forefront, and where that which is called "the conciliar consciousness" [sobornoe soznanie - in the sense of community with God and fellow worshippers] is devalued?" But his own observations and, especially, his conversations with priests and other members of the "village intelligentsia" showed him, instead, that our people does not hold to the Church mystically or essentially. The peasants turned