The article examines the features of stories about the “punishment of God”, or stories about the “miraculous” death of blasphemers, published in Russian diocesan journals of the late 19th — early 20th century. The historiographic gap in this area determines the novelty of the work. In addition to the traditional methods of historical research, the research methodology was based on the model of the “emotional process” by N. Frijda and B. Mesquito, the concept of “public images of feeling” by K. Geertz (“emotional matrices” by A. L. Zorin) and B. Rosenwein’s concept of textual “emotional communities”. Narrative monotony of stories about the “punishment of God”, their rigid genre framework, their belonging to the community of authors and readers from the clergy, made it possible to single out stable emotional structures in them. Firstly, blasphemy is presented in the form of an “emotional” crime, the characteristic features of a “blasphemer” as a subject of emotions are highlighted: it is a source of destructive experiences, unable to control feelings that are destructive for him and harmful to others (anger, malice, hatred), prone to impious fun, bold. Secondly, a blasphemer is considered as an object of emotions of a religious “moralist”, in the role of which the author (narrator) of the story acted and, as it was supposed, the reader of the text should have acted: this is hostility towards the sinner, alienation from him, satisfaction with the disastrous outcome of his “crime”. Thirdly, the forms of expression of the key genre emotion — fear (horror) are investigated, a three-dimensional model of its analysis is proposed: fear of the victim of “God’s judgment”; fear of eyewitnesses of the “miracle”; fear of the author — commentator and publisher.