The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I bumped into a peasant woman with a newborn baby. The woman was still young, her baby would be about six weeks old. The baby smiled at her, by the look of it, for the first time since its birth. I looked, and all of a sudden, very devoutly she crossed herself. “Why are you doing that, young lady?” I asked. (For I was always asking questions in those days.) “Well,” she said, “just as a mother rejoices when she notices the first smile from her baby, so God rejoices every time he looks down from heaven and sees a sinner kneeling before him and praying with all his heart.” That was what the woman told me, almost in those very same words – such a profound, such a subtle and truly religious thought, a thought in which the whole essence of Christianity was instantly expressed: the whole concept of God as our father and of God’s rejoicing in man, like the rejoicing of a father in his child – the principal idea of Christ!