From the memoirs of Hegumen Nikon (Vorobyov).
“I began serving as a priest, and the better I thought I served, the more my self-esteem grew deep down. Spiritual matters are not so simple. To know what's going on deep down, you need to be very attentive and pray a lot, with your own personal prayer. So, one time, an idea came to me, perhaps from the enemy. I began doing a hundred prostrations with the Jesus Prayer in the evening, after evening prayers—perhaps until two o'clock. Now I'm saying all this, not to boast, but so you understand a little. And in the morning, before the service, I had to do another hundred prostrations, get up at four o'clock, and do them. So what? Was it good for me? The nuns saw it from the outside—they're curious people. But the Lord saw that I was doing the devil's work, not God's. And so, I had a conflict with Father Raphael. And I not only wasn't rewarded in some way, I was expelled from the priesthood, banned from serving (the ban was imposed by Bishop Onisifor of Kaluga – ed.). This is the judgment of God and the judgment of man. Of course, it was the power of God that expelled me, and it also reinstated me. But one might have thought I suffered for some good deed, for my exploits. But the Lord made it clear that this was demonic, that it was vanity, a self-importance: "Look, I'm a priest, I serve all the time, I come home—prayers, reading the Word of God, and even though I'm not young anymore, almost 55, I make a hundred prostrations in the evening, a hundred prostrations in the morning—with attention! This is how complex the spiritual matters are."
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