who posed as prophets and preached a strange new doctrine which they dug
out of the more obscure passages of the Book of Revelations.

In the year 1814, Alexander, who had already consulted a large number
of wonder-doctors, heard of a new seeress who was foretelling the coming
doom of the world and was exhorting people to repent ere it be too late.
The Baroness von Krudener, the lady in question, was a Russian woman of
uncertain age and similar reputation who had been the wife of a Russian
diplomat in the days of the Emperor Paul. She had squandered her
husband's money and had disgraced him by her strange love affairs. She
had lived a very dissolute life until her nerves had given way and for a
while she was not in her right mind. Then she had been converted by
the sight of the sudden death of a friend. Thereafter she despised all
gaiety. She confessed her former sins to her shoemaker, a pious Moravian
brother, a follower of the old reformer John Huss, who had been burned
for his heresies by the Council of Constance in the year 1415.

The next ten years the Baroness spent in Germany making a specialty
of the "conversion" of kings and princes. To convince Alexander, the
Saviour of Europe, of the error of his ways was the greatest ambition
of her life. And as Alexander, in his misery, was willing to listen
to anybody who brought him a ray of hope, the interview was easily
arranged. On the evening of the fourth of June of the year 1815, she was
admitted to the tent of the Emperor. She found him reading his Bible.
We do not know what she said to Alexander, but when she left him three
hours later, he was bathed in tears, and vowed that "at last his
soul had found peace." From that day on the Baroness was his faithful
companion and his spiritual adviser. She followed him to Paris and then
to Vienna and the time which Alexander did not spend dancing he spent at
the Krudener prayer-meetings.

You may ask why I tell you this story in such great detail? Are not the
social changes of the nineteenth century of greater importance than the
career of an ill-balanced woman who had better be forgotten? Of course
they are, but there exist any number of books which will tell you of
these other things with great accuracy and in great detail. I want you
to learn something more from this history than a mere succession of
facts. I want you to approach all historical events in a frame of mind
that will take nothing for granted. Don't be satis