“You exaggerate the matter very much,” said Ivan Petrovitch, with rather a bored air. “There are, in the foreign Churches, many representatives of their faith who are worthy of respect and esteem.”

“Oh, but I did not speak of individual representatives. I was merely talking about Roman Catholicism, and its essence⁠—of Rome itself. A Church can never entirely disappear; I never hinted at that!”

“Agreed that all this may be true; but we need not discuss a subject which belongs to the domain of theology.”