" A recent book on Russia relates the story of the anger of the Apostle John because a certain peasant burned no tapers to his ikon, but honored, instead, the ikon of Apostle Peter in St. John's own church.

And they took the sacred ikon of the Holy Mother of God of Smolensk, the pleader for the grief-stricken, and carried it to the famous field of Borodino, and, bowing down before it, with tearful eyes, they cried: "O Most Holy Mother of God, thou art our life and our hope!