“That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?” said Lidia Ivanovna. “But that is a false idea. There is no sin for believers, their sin has been atoned for. Pardon ,” she added, looking at the footman, who came in again with another letter. She read it and gave a verbal answer: “Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess’s, say.” “For the believer sin is not,” she went on.

“Yes, but faith without works is dead,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, recalling the phrase from the catechism, and only by his smile clinging to his independence.

“There you have it⁠—from the epistle of St. James,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a certain reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a subject they had discussed more than once before. “What harm has been done by the false interpretation of that passage! Nothing holds men back from belief like that misinterpretation. ‘I have not works, so I cannot believe,’ though all the while that is not said. But the very opposite is said.”