St. Tikhon of Zadonsk

The son of a poor village sexton who became Bishop of Voronezh, worked himself into illness in four years, and retired to the monastery at Zadonsk, where he spent his last fourteen years in a cell giving everything he had to the poor. He wrote On True Christianity and A Spiritual Treasure Gathered from the World, which finds a lesson of the Gospel in everything from a ploughed field to a stove. He was known to bear insults without answering them, and once asked forgiveness of a nobleman who had struck him. Dostoevsky drew on him for the elder Zosima. He died in 1783 and was glorified in 1861. Feast: August 13.