A Confession

1 Here Tolstoy introduces an argument which occurs repeatedly in his works. He diverts the argument as to whether a man of good will, who desires to preserve the peace, is morally justified in forcibly restraining a murderer, by a reference to the ! difficulty of judging the facts of each case rightly. The moral issue is perplexed by the introduction of a simultaneous consideration of the fact that man is intellectually fallible. Son said, do not pluck them out. One or the other has to be acknowledged ; and St. John Chrysostom, and following him the Church in general, acknowledges the command of God the Father, that is to say of Moses, and rejects the command of the Son, that is of Christ, whose teaching he is supposed to profess. Christ rejects the law of Moses and gives his own. For a man believing in Christ there is no contradiction. Disregarding the law of Moses, he believes in the law of Christ and fulfils it. For one believing in the law of Moses there is also no contradiction. The Jews consider the words of Christ vain, and believe in the law of Moses. There is a contradiction only for those who wish to live by the law of Moses, but assure themselves and others that they believe the law of Christ — for those whom Christ calls hypocrites, the offspring of vipers.

Instead of acknowledging one of the two, the law of Moses or of Christ, they acknowledge both to be divinely true. But when the question touches life itself, the law of Christ is simply denied and the law of Moses acknowledged. In this false interpretation, if one examines its meaning, lies a terrible drama of the struggle of evil and darkness with goodness and light. J Among the Jewish people, confused by in- 1 numerable external rules laid on them by the | 1 Levites as divine laws and each stamped with i f the words fi The Lord said unto Moses/ Christ t appeared. He found not only the relations of man to God, his sacrifices, holidays and fasts, I fi but all the relations of man to man — the national, civil, and family relations — and all the details of private life — circumcisions, the washings of man’s person, and of his cups and his dress — all defined to the last detail, and all acknowledged as the command of God, the law of God. What can, I will not say Christ— God, but a prophet or an ordinary teacher, teach to such a people without infringing this law,, which defines everything down to the smallest details ? Christ, like all the prophets, selects from among the things the people considered to be the lav/ of God that which was really the law of God. He takes the foundations, and rejects all the rest, and unites his own revelation of the eternal i law with these foundations. There is no need to destroy everything, but inevitably the law, which I was considered equally obligatory in ail its parts, is broken. Christ does this ; and he is accused i of breaking what was considered to be the law ! of God, and for this he is executed. But his i teaching remains among his disciples and passes ! into another circle and into other centuries. But in this other circle, and these other centuries, the new teaching is again overgrown by similar accretions, interpretations, and explanations — again mean human inventions replace the divine revelation. Instead of ‘ And the Lord said unto I Moses,’ we are told 1 : £ It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us,’ and again the letter hides the spirit. And, most surprising of all, the teaching of Christ becomes involved with all that

1 By the Councils of the Church. The expression first occurs in Acts xv. 28. torah (in the meaning of the written law) which he could not but reject. That torah is acknowledged to be the production of the revelation of his Spirit of truth, of the Holy Ghost, and he is himself caught in the meshes of his own revelation, and his whole teaching is reduced to nothing. So that is why, after 1,800 years, so strange 1 a thing befell me, as to have to discover the meaning of Christ’s teaching as though it were something new. I did not have to discover it, but I had to do what has been done and is being done by all who seek God and His law : to disentangle the eternal , law of God from among all the other things people have called by that name.

And so, when I understood Christ’s law to be the law of Christ, and not the law of Moses and Christ, and understood the statement of that law, which directly disavows the law of Moses, the Gospels as a whole, instead of their former obscurity, disunion, and contradictoriness, disclosed themselves as one indivisible whole, and ! amid them the essence of the whole teaching ! became clear, expressed in the five simple, clear j commandments of Christ, accessible to everyone (Matt. v. 21-48), but about which I had till then known nothing. Throughout the Gospels Christ’s commandments and their fulfilment are spoken of. All the theologians speak of Christ’s commandments, but what those commandments were I formerly did not know. It seemed to me that the commands of Christ consisted in this : to love God, and my neighbour as myself. But I did not see that this could not be Christ’s commandment, because it is a commandment of ‘ them of old time ’ (Deut. and Lev.). The words (Matt. v. 19) 4 Whosoever shall break one of these least commandments , and shall teach men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of 181 heaven,’ I attributed to the laws of Moses. And the fact that the new commandments of Christ are clearly and definitely expressed in verses 21-48 of Matt. v. never entered my head. I did not see that where Christ says, ‘ It was said to you ; but I say unto you,5 new and definite commands of Christ are given, namely, according to the number of references to the ancient law (and counting two references to adultery as one), five new, clear, and definite commandments of Christ.

About the Beatitudes and their number I had heard, and had met with enumerations and explanations in Scripture lessons, but of Christ’s commands I had never heard anything. To my surprise I had to discover them. This is how I did so. In Matt. v. 21-26, it is said : 4 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill [Exod. xx. 13] , and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgement. But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgement : and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council ; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. If therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee ; leave there thy gift before the altar and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him ; lest haply the adversary deliver thee to the judge and the judge

deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.. Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.’ When I understood the commandment of non-resistance to him that is evil it seemed to me that these verses about anger ought to have ■ I as clear a meaning, and one as applicable to life as the commandment about resisting him that is evil. The meaning I had formerly attributed i to those words was that every one should always | avoid anger against others and should never use words of abuse, but should live at peace with all men without exception ; but there were words in the text which excluded that meaning. It was said : Do not be angry 4 without a cause,’ so that no unconditional injunction to be peaceable is found in the words. Those words 4 without a cause ’ perplexed me : and to solve my doubts I consulted the interpretations of the I theologians, and to my amazement I found that the interpretations of the Fathers of the Church are chiefly directed to explaining when anger is excusable and when it is not excusable. All the Church interpretations lay particular stress on the meaning of the words without a cause , and explain the passage in the sense that one must not insult innocent people, and one must not employ words of abuse, but that anger is not always unjustifiable ; in confirmation of which view they quote the anger of saints and Apostles.

I I could not but admit that, though it contradicts the whole sense of the Gospels, this explanation that anger, as they say, is not forbidden by the word of God, follows from and finds support in the words without a cause— which occur in verse 22. These words change the meaning of the whole utterance. Be not angry without a cause . Christ bids us forgive all, forgive endlessly. He himself forgives, and forbids Peter to be angry with Malchus when Peter, not without cause it would seem, defended his Master who was being led to crucifixion. And this same Christ, for the instruction of all men, says : Do not be angry without a cause , and thereby sanctions anger with a cause — anger which is deserved. Christ preaches peace to all the plain folk, and suddenly, as though explaining that this does not refer to all cases, but that there are cases when one may be angry with one's brother, he inserts the words without a cause. In the interpretations it is explained that there is timely anger. But who, asked I, is to be judge of when anger is timely ? I have never seen angry people who considered their anger untimely. They all consider their anger just and useful. Those words destroy the whole meaning of the verse. But the words stood in Holy Writ, and I could not cancel them. Yet those words were as though to the saying, Love thy neighbour were added, Love thy good neighbour , or, Love the neighbour whom thou approvest of.

The whole meaning of the passage was destroyed for me by the words without a cause. The verses that said that before praying one must be reconciled to those who are angry with one, which without the words ‘without a cause ’ would have had a plain and obligatory meaning, also acquired this conditional meaning. It seemed to me that Christ should have forbidden all anger, all ill-will, and, for its elimination, bidden every one, before he brings his sacrifice — that is to say, before entering into communion with God — to remember whether there is not some one who is angry with him. And if there is any one who rightfully or wrongfully is angry with you, you must first go and be reconciled, and only then bring your offering or your prayer. So it seemed to me ; but according to the commentaries the passage must i be understood conditionally. In all the commentaries it is explained that one must try to be at peace with all, but if that is impossible, owing to the depravity of those who are at strife with you, you must be at peace in your soul, in your thoughts, and then the enmity of the others against you need not prevent your praying. Besides this, the words that declare that whoso says 4 Raca 9 and ‘ Thou fool * is terribly guilty always seemed to me strange and obscure. If one is forbidden to scold, why are such weak, almost unabusive words selected as examples ? And also why is so terrible a threat directed against him who lets fall such a weak word of abuse as ‘ Raca/ which means ‘ a nobody J i This too is obscure.

* I felt that there was a misunderstanding similar to that which occurred with reference to the words, ‘ judge not/ I felt that, as in that interpretation so in this, what is simple, important, definite, and practicable is all changed into what is obscure and indefinite. I felt that Christ could not understand the words, * Go, be reconciled to thine adversary/ in the way they are explained to us, as meaning, 4 Be reconciled in your thoughts/ What does being reconciled in one's thoughts mean ? It seemed to me that Christ was demanding what he elsewhere expressed in the words of the prophets : 4 I will have mercy and not sacrifice ' — that is to say, love to man. And therefore, if you wish to please God, before praying at morning and evening, at matins and evensong, remember whether any one is angry with you and go and arrange matters so that he may not be angry with you, and, after that, pray if you please. And then we are told that this is only 4 in thought/ I felt that the whole interpretation which destroyed for me the direct and clear meaning of the passage was based on the words 4 without a cause.' If they were struck out, the meaning would be clear ; but against my interpretation all the expositors were ranged, as well as the canonical Gospel, with the words, 4 without a cause.' If I yield on this point I may as well yield on others at my fancy ; and other people may do the same. The whole matter lay in those words. If they were not there, all would be clear. And I tried to find some philological explanation of the words which would not infringe the whole meaning. I looked up the Greek word interpreted 4 with-

out a cause , in the dictionaries ; and I saw that this word, in Greek eUr), means ‘ without purpose/ 4 inconsiderately/ I tried to give it a meaning which would not infringe the sense of the passage, but evidently the addition of that word has the meaning which is given it. I consulted other dictionaries, but the meaning given of the word was the same. I consulted the context, and found that the word is employed only once in the Gospel, namely, in this passage. In the Epistles it is employed several times. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, xv. 2, it is used just in this sense. Therefore it is impossible to explain it otherwise, and one has to admit that Christ said : Do not be angry unnecessarily ! I must confess that for me to admit that Christ could in this passage use such obscure words, which can be understood so that nothing remains of their meaning, was tantamount to rejecting the whole Gospel. There remained one last hope : Is the word found in all the manuscripts ? I looked up the manuscripts. I referred to Greisbach, who shows all the variations — that is to say, he shows in what manuscripts and by what Fathers of the Church an expression is used. I looked, and was at once thrown into an ecstasy by observing that to this passage there are remarks — there are

I variations. I went on and found that the variations all refer to the word cUrj, c without a cause/ Most of the manuscripts of the Gospel and the quotations of the passage in the Fathers of the Church do not contain the word at all ! Therefore most of them understood the matter as I do. I then referred to Tischendorf — to the oldest text — and the word was not there at all ! , I looked at Luther's translations, where I might j have got at the matter most quickly, and th eword was not there either. The very word which infringes the whole j meaning of Christ's teaching was added to the Gospels in the fifth century, and is not 1 to be found in the best manuscripts. Someone inserted the word, and there were others who approved of it and wrote commentaries upon it. Christ could not, and did not, utter that dreadful word ; and the first, simple, direct meaning of the whole passage, which occurred . to me and occurs to every one, is the true j meaning. ( But, more than this, I had only to understand { that Christ's words always forbid all anger < against any one whatever, for the injunction not j | to say to any one, 4 Raca,' or ‘ Thou fool,' which j had formerly perplexed me, to receive another j meaning than that Christ forbids the use of ( abusive words. The strange, untranslated € Hebrew word, Baca , supplied me with the clue. ! r Baca means trampled on, destroyed, nonexisting ; and the word rah , a very usual word, c has the sense of exclusion, only not . Baca means j a man who should not be accounted a man. In j, the plural the word rchim is used in the Book j j of Judges (ix. 4) where it means 4 lost persons.' j ] And that is the word Christ bids us not to use of j any man. As he bids us not use another a word, fool , so also he bids us not use raca , a

which professes to free us from our human obligations to our neighbour. We get angry and do evil to men, and to justify ourselves we say that he with whom we a,re angry is a lost or insane man. And just those two words Christ bids us not to use of men or to men. Christ bids us not be angry with any one, and not justify our anger by declaring a man to be lost or insane. And so, instead of a cloudy, indefinite expression admitting of arbitrary interpretation, in Matt. v. 21-28, I found Christ’s first clear and definite commandment : Live at peace with all men, and never consider your anger against any man justified. Do not consider any one nor call any one lost or a fool (v. 22). And not only must you not consider your anger against another justifiable, but you must not consider another's anger against yourself causeless ; and therefore if any one is angry with you, though he be in the wrong, yet before saying your prayers go and remove his hostile feeling (v. 23, 24). Try in advance to destroy any enmity between yourself and others that it may not flame up and destroy you (v. 25, 26).

After the first commandment, with equal clearness the second revealed itself to me. It also begins with a reference to the ancient law. In Matt. v. 27-30 it is said : £ You have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery [Ex. xx. 14]. But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on *!a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck t1 it out, and cast it from thee 1 ; for it is profitable \ for thee that one of thy members should perish, |! and not thy whole body be cast into hell. But if thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it off and cast it from thee : for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body go into hell/ Matt. v. 31-2 : ‘ It was said also, Whosoever * shall put away his wife, let him give her a J writing of divorcement [Deut. xxiv. 1]. But I say unto you, every one that putteth away his wife [besides the sin of adultery, gives her cause to commit adultery], and whosoever shall marry her that is put away committeth adultery/ 2

The meaning of these words appeared to 1 me to be this : a man should not admit even the thought that he can have connexion with 1 any woman but the one with whom he first s has sexual relations,3 and must never change * 1 Tolstoy sometimes carries his adherence to the • letter of Christ’s saying to an extreme, but in the case of this text it will be noticed that he does not s agree with those Russian sectarians who rely on the l surgical operation of castration as a desirable correc- < tive of sexual desire. ( 2 It will be noticed that Tolstoy’s translation' of . this passage, in the words inserted in square brackets, * differs from our Authorized or Revised Versions and 1 helps to make sense of the passage. 3 Note that this view was alluded to in Anna | Karenina (vol. i, chap, xxiv, p. 98, World’s Classics j edition), where the incident was borrowed from the j actual life of Tolstoy’s brother, Dmitry, who took a , woman he had found in a brothel to live with him, and ( regarded her as a wife to whom he was bound for life, i

her for another, as was permitted by the Mosaic law. As in the First Commandment against anger we are advised to extinguish anger at its commencement, advice that is illustrated by the comparison with a man brought before a court of justice, so here Christ says that adultery arises from the fact that women and men regard each other as objects of desire. That this may not be so, it is necessary to remove all that might arouse lust. One must avoid all that evokes lust, and, having once united oneself with a woman, must under no circumstances abandon her, for the abandonment of wives causes depravity. The abandoned wives tempt other men, and spread depravity abroad in the world. The wisdom of this commandment impressed me. It removes all the evil that flows from sexual relations. Men and women, knowing indulgence in sexual relations to lead to strife, should avoid all that evokes desire ; and, knowing it to be the law of man's nature to live in couples, should unite with one another in couples and never under any circumstances infringe these alliances ; so that the whole evil of strife caused by sexual relations is removed by the fact that there are no solitary men or women left deprived of married life.1

1 Tolstoy delighted in absolute laws, and was eager to attribute perfection and finality to those he formulated. But this law, of which he fully approved when lie wrote this book in 1884, no longer satisfied him )when in 1889 he wrote the Kreutzer Sonata , and in the Afterword thereto declared that marriage for a But the words which had always surprised me when reading the Sermon on the Mount, except for the sin of adultery , understood in the sense that a man may divorce his wife if she has committed adultery, now struck me yet more forcibly. In addition to the fact that there is something undignified in the way of expressing this thought, putting this strange exception to the general rule (which is introduced like a note to a paragraph of a code of laws) beside profoundly important truths, the exception itself contradicts the fundamental thought. I turned to the commentators, and they all (St. John Chrysostom and the others), end even the learned theological critics such as Reuss, admitted that these words meant that Christ sanctions divorce in case of a wife's adultery, and that in Matt. xix. in Christ's remarks forbidding divorce, the words ‘except for fornication ' mean the same thing. I read and re-read chapter v. 32, and it seemed to me that it could not mean an approval of divorce. To verify this I referred to the contexts, and found in the Gospels of Matt, xix., Mark x., and Luke xvi. and in the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, an explanation of the teaching

Christian must always be 4 a fall, a sin.’ The explanation of his change of view lay in the fact that his wife disagreed with his wish to renounce his property, and he found that his physical affection for her made it hard for him to adhere to his principles. Marriage was therefore an obstacle to right life, and as such, it seemed to him, should be shunned by a Christian. of marriage inviolability without any exceptions.1 In Luke xvi. 18 is said : 6 Every one that putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, •committeth adultery : and he that marrieth one that is put away from a husband committeth adultery/ In Mark x. 5-12 it is also said, without any exception : £ For your hardness of heart Moses wrote this commandment. But from the beginning of the creation, male and female made he them. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife ; and the twain shall become one flesh : so that they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder. And in the house his disciples asked him again of this matter. And he said unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if she herself shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery/ The same is repeated in Matt. xix. 4-9.

In the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, vii. 1-12, the idea of forestalling depravity by each husband and wife, when once they have united, not abandoning one another, but 1 At a time when Parliament has to deal with the marriage laws, it is in place to remember that Tolstoy wrote solely of what he considered to be Christian duty, entirely apart from legal enactment or Church ceremony of any kind. He disapproved of legal interference with the right of man or woman to form or rescind ■unions with one another. satisfying one another in sexual relation^, is developed. It is also plainly said that neither of them must on any account desert the other to have relations with some one else. By Mark, Luke, and Paul’s Epistle divorce is not sanctioned. The sense of the explanation I that a husband and a wife are one flesh, united by God — an explanation repeated in two of the Gospels — does not sanction divorce. By Christ’s whole teaching which bids us forgive all, and makes no exception in the case of an unfaithful wife, divorce is not sanctioned. The meaning of the whole passage, which explains that the dismissal of a wife is the cause of depravity, gives it no sanction.

On what is the interpretation based which sanctions divorce from an adulterous wife ? Only on the words in Matt. v. 32, which seemed to me so strange. They are interpreted by every one to mean that Christ sanctions divorce if a wife commits adultery, and these same words are repeated in many of the copies of the Gospels and by many Fathers of the Church instead of the words except for fornication (Matt. xix. 5-9). Again I began to consider these words, but it was long before I could understand them. I saw that there must be a mistake in translation and interpretation, but where the mistake lay I was long unable to discover. The mistake was evident. Contrasting his commandment with the law of Moses, under which any man, as is there said, who hates his wife, can dismiss her and give her a writing of divorcement, Christ says : ‘ But I say unto you , that every o^e that putieth away his wife , saving for the cause of fornication [or, besides the cause \ of fornication ], causeth her to commit adultery * These words present no antithesis to the Mosaic law, nor even any decision as to whether one may, or may not, divorce. It is only said that putting away a wife gives her occasions to commit adultery.

And then suddenly an exception is made in the case of a wife guilty of adultery. This exception concerning a wife guilty of adultery, when the matter in hand related to the husband, would in any case be strange and unexpected, I and occurring wdiere it does it is simply stupid, i for it destroys even such doubtful meaning as the verse otherwise had. It is said that putting away a wife occasions her to commit adultery, and it then allows you to put away a wife guilty of adultery ; as though a wife guilty of adultery will then no longer commit adultery. But, more than that, when I examined this (passage more carefully I noticed that it does not even make sense grammatically. It is said that every one that putteth away his wife , | saving for the cause of fornication , causeth her to commit adultery , and the sentence ends ! It refers to a man, and says that if he puts av/ay his wife he gives her occasion to commit adultery. Why is it said, saving for the cause of the wife's adultery ? If it were said that a man, divorcing his wife for any cause except ^her commission of adultery, commits adultery, then the sentence would be correct. As it is,

to the grammatical subject, every one that putteth away, there is no predicate except eauseth . How can that predicate r^ate to the words saving for the cause of ornication ? # It is impossible to ‘ cause, saving for the wife’s fornication 5 ! Even if with the words ‘ saving for the cause of fornication ’ were included the words ‘the wife’s,’ or ‘her’ (which is not done), even then those words could not relate to the predicate ‘ eauseth.’ These words, in the accepted interpretation, are related to the predicate, putteth away, but putteth away is not the chief predicate : the chief predicate is eauseth . Why is ‘ except for the cause of fornication ’ wanted ? With adultery or without it a husband who puts away his wife equally eauseth . The expression reads as though some one were to say : ‘ Whoso depriveth his son of food, except for [or besides] the sin of cruelty, eauseth him to be cruel.’ Such an expression evidently cannot imply that the father may deprive his son of food if the son is cruel. If it has any meaning it can only be that the father who deprives his son of food, besides the sin of being cruel himself, causes the son too to be cruel. So the Gospel expression would have a meaning if, instead of the words the sin of fornication, it read ‘ the sin of voluptuousness, dissoluteness,1 or any-

1 Tolstoy’s indictment of the received translation of various passages in the Gospels has had considerable circulation, and by many readers is accepted as authoritative. As yet, so far as the present translator knows, no prominent Churchman has either admitted any of the alleged errors, or produced any thing of that kind, expressing not an action but a quality. And I asked myself : Is it not simply said that he who puts away his wife, besides being himself guilty of dissoluteness (since people divorce one wife in order to take another), causes his wife also to commit adultery ? If the word ‘ fornication ’ in the text is expressed by a word that may also mean dissoluteness, the meaning is clear. What has so often happened in such cases occurred again this time. The text confirmed my supposition, so that no further doubt about it was possible. The first things that caught my eye on looking at the Greek text was that the word iropvda is translated by the same word ‘ fornication 5 that is used to translate the word reasoned rejoinder to Tolstoy’s assertions. A pronouncement on these matters from some recognized and impartial authority of admitted competence would therefore be valuable as a help towards clearing up questions which are as important as they are doubtful.

The only contribution the present translator can make to the matter is to record the fact that, some fifteen years after What I Believe was written, he asked Tolstoy whether he still held to the interpretations he had advanced when dealing with the Gospels. Tolstoy replied that he had ceased to attach special importance to precise words attributed to J esus, and admitted that, in his anxiety to counteract the bias he detected in the ‘ Orthodox ’ translation, he had sometimes overstrained the sense too much in a contrary direction, as one engaged on demagnetizing a watch may sometimes expose it to too strong an opposite influence ; but he thought his Greek reliable. fjbOLxacOaL, which is quite a different word. But perhaps these words are synonymous, or are used in the Gospels alternatively ? I looked up all the dictionaries, both the general dictionary and the Gospel dictionary, and I saw that the word iropvda, which corresponds to the Hebrew zono, and to the Latin fornicatio, the German Hurerei, French lihertinage , and the English c incontinence,’ has a most definite meaning, and never, in any dictionary, has meant or can mean the act of fornication, aduliere , Ehebruch, as it is translated. It means a sinful condition or quality, and never an action, and should not be translated by 4 fornication.’ Moreover, I see that the word 4 adultery,’ and £ to commit adultery/ is everywhere in the Gospels, and even in these verses, represented by the word /xoiyeuV And I only had to correct this evidently intentional error in translation for the meaning given by the commentators on this passage and on the passage in chap. xix. to become quite impossible, and for it to become indubitable that Tropveta relates to the husband.

The translation any one knowing Greek would make is this : TraptKTos — besides, Aoyov — the sin, Tropvecas — of dissoluteness, Troizi — he causes, avrrjv — her, p.oLxa(r6cu — to commit adultery ; and the result is, word for word : ‘ he who puts away his wife, besides the sin of dissoluteness, causes her to commit adultery.’ The same sense is found in ch. xix. One need but correct the erroneous translation of the word ? ro/Wa, and replace the word 4 forni- cation 5 by the word ‘dissoluteness,’ for it to become plain that the words : et pyj iirl iropvda cannot refer to the wife. And as the words 7rapeKTos \6yov 7ropveia9 can only mean 4 besides the husband’s sin of dissoluteness,’ so the words d ixT] €7 rt n-opvda in ch. xix. can only refer to the husband’s dissoluteness. The words are — d prj hr\ iropvda , word for word : 4 if not from dissoluteness.’ And this meaning appears : that Christ, replying in this passage to the belief of the Pharisees, who supposed that if a man left his wife, not to live dissolutely but in order to marry another woman, he was not committing adultery — - Christ says that the leaving of one’s wife, i.e. the cessation of marital relations with her, even if not occasioned by dissoluteness, but done for the sake of marriage-union with another, is also adultery. And a plain meaning results which accords with the whole teaching,

I with the context, with the grammar, and with logic. And this clear and simple meaning, flowing from the words themselves and from the whole I teaching, I had to discover with the greatest ■ difficulty. Indeed, read the verse in German or in French, where it is plainly said pour 1 cause d’infidelite, and, d moins que cela ne soil pour cause d'infidelite , and can you guess that it means something quite different ? The word TrapeKTo?, which in all the dictionaries means excepte , ausgenommen, besides, is trans- Ilated by a whole sentence — d moins que cela ne soil ; the word 7ropmas is translated infidelite, Ehebruch, fornication. And on this intentional perversion of the text rests an interpretation which infringes the moral, religious, grammatical, and logical sense of Christ’s words. Again I was confirmed in the terrible but joyful truth that the meaning of Christ’s teaching is plain and simple and its statements are important, but that interpretations of it, based on a wish to justify existing evil, have so obscured it that it has to be rediscovered with difficulty.. It became plain to me that if the Gospels had been discovered half burnt or obliterated it w ould have been easier to recover their meaning than it is now, when dishonest interpretations have been applied to them with the direct purpose of perverting and hiding the meaning of the teaching. In this case it was still plainer than in the former that some private aim of justifying the divorce of some Ivan the Terrible had been the reason for obscuring the whole doctrine of marriage.

As soon as one rejects the commentaries, in place of what was obscure and indefinite the definite and clear second commandment of Christ reveals itself. Do not make the desire for sexual relations into an amusement ; let every man, if he is not a eunuch — that is, if he needs sexual relations — have a wife, and each wife a husband, and let the husband have only one wife and the wife only one husband, and under no pretext infringe the sexual union of one with the other. Immediately after the second commandment comes again a reference to the ancient law, and the third commandment is set forth (Matt. v. 33-7) : ‘ Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths [Lev. xix. 12 ; Deut. xxiii. 21]: but I say unto you, Swear not at all ; neither by heaven, for it is God's throne : nor by the earth ; for it is his footstool : neither by Jerusalem ; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But your speech shall be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay : for whatsoever is more than these is of the evil one/

This passage, when I had read it before, had always perplexed me. It did so, not (as did the passage about divorce) by its obscurity, nor by contradicting other passages (as did the sanction of anger with a cause), nor by the difficulty I of fulfilling it (as with the passage about offering the other cheek) ; on the contrary, it perplexed me by its clearness, simplicity, and ease. Side by side with rules, the profundity and importance of which terrified and touched me, , one suddenly found such an unnecessary, empty, easy rule, which was of no consequence to me or to others. As it was, I swore neither by Jeru- ! salem, nor by God, nor by anything else, and it cost me no effort to abstain : besides which, it seemed to me that whether I swore or not could have no importance to any one. And wishing Ito find an explanation of this rule, which perplexed me by its ease, I turned to the inter- preters ; and this time the interpreters really helped me. They all see in these words a confirmation of the third commandment of Moses — not to swear by the name of God. They explain these words to mean that Christ, like Moses, forbids us to pronounce God's name in vain. But besides this, the interpreters also explain that this law of Christ's — not to swear— is not always obligatory and does not relate at all to an oath of loyalty which each citizen gives to those who hold authority 1 * * ; and texts are selected from Holy Writ, not to confirm the direct meaning of Christ's injunction, but to prove that it may and should be disobeyed.

It is said that Christ himself confirmed an oath in a court of law when in reply to the High Priest's words, ‘ I adjure thee by the living God,' he replied, 4 Thou hast said.' It is said that the apostle Paul called God to witness the truth of his words, which is evidently the same as an oath ; it is said that oaths were enjoined by the law of Moses, and that God did not abolish these oaths ; it is said that it is only vain, pharisaical, hypocritical oaths that are abolished. And on understanding the meaning and aim 1 A reason Tolstoy ignores for forbidding oaths is, that as the belief (common in primitive times) that men can stake their lives or possessions on the veracity of their assertions and that the deity will enforce the penalties should the oath be a false one, fades away, the use of such oaths becomes incompatible with intellectual integrity, and therefore fails to accomplish its object and even conflicts with it. of these explanations, I understood that Christ's injunction concerning oaths is not at all so insignificant, easy, and unimportant as it had seemed to me when, among the oaths prohibited by Christ, I had not included oaths demanded by the State.

And I asked myself : Is it not said here that the oath is also forbidden for which the Church i commentators are so anxious to make an exception ? Is not the oath here forbidden, that very oath without which the separation of men into nations is impossible, and without which a military class is impossible ? Soldiers are those who do all the violence, and they call themselves ‘ the sworn.' 1 * * Were I to ask the Grenadier how he solves the contradiction between the Gospels and the military code he would tell me that he has been sworn in : that is to say, has taken an oath on the Gospels. Such replies have always been given me by military men. So necessary is an oath for the organization of the terrible evil which is produced by violence and war, that in France, where Christianity is officially rejected, the oath is nevertheless retained. Indeed if Christ had not said ‘ Swear not at all,' I he ought to have said it. He came to destroy evil, and, had he not abolished the oath, this enormous evil would have remained in the world . Perhaps it will be said that in the time of Christ that evil was not noticeable. But this is untrue :

1 In Russian literally 4 the oath.’ The equivalent * English expressions, ‘ volunteers ’ or 4 conscripts,’ do not carry the same significance, though in England they also take an oath of allegiance. Epictetus and Seneca spoke about not taking an oath to any one ; in the laws of Manu that rule is found. Why should I say that Christ did not see this evil ? And especially when he said this so directly, clearly, and even minutely. He said : Swear not at all . That expression is as ["simple, clear, and indubitable as the words ‘ Judge not and condemn not/ and as little susceptible of misinterpretation, especially as it is added, in conclusion, that anything demanded of you beyond yes and no comes from the source of evil. Really, if Christ's teaching is that one should always obey the will of God, how can a man swear to obey the will of man ? The will of God may not coincide with the will of man. Indeed, in this very passage Christ says that very thing. He says, Swear not by thy head, for not only thy head, but every hair of it, is in God's power. The same is said in the Epistle of James.

At the end of his Epistle, in conclusion, the Apostle James says (ch. v. 12); But above all things , my brethren , swear not , neither by the heaven , nor by the earth , nor by any other oath : but let your yea be yea, and your nay , nay ; that ye fall not under judgement . The Apostle says plainly why one should not swear : the oath by itself appears innocent, but from it people fall under judgement, and therefore swear not at all. How could what is said both by Christ and by the Apostle be said more plainly ? But I had been so entangled that I long asked myself in astonishment : Can it be that it means what it does mean ? How is it that we are all made to swear on the Gospels ? It is impossible ! But I had already read the commentators and had seen how this impossibility was accomplished. As with the explanations of the words, Judge not, do not be angry with anybody, do not break the bond of husband and wife, so also here. We have established* our ways of life, we like them, and wish to consider them sacred. Then comes Christ, whom we consider to be God, but we do not wish to abandon our ways of life. What are we to do ? Where possible, slip in the words without a cause , and reduce the rule against anger to nothing ; where possible, like the most unscrupulous of unjust judges, interpret the meaning of the articles of the law so as to make it mean the very reverse, and that instead of a command never to divorce one’s wife it should mean that one may divorce her. And where, as in the case of the words J udge not , and condemn not , and swear not at all , it is quite impossible to misinterpret, act boldly and directly contrary to the teaching, affirming that we are obeying it. Indeed the chief obstacle to understanding that the Gospels forbid every vow, and especially r every oath of allegiance, is that pseudo-Christian teachers with extraordinary effrontery oblige men, on the Gospels themselves, to swear by the Gospels — that is to say, oblige them to do what is contrary to the Gospels.

How can it occur to a man who is obliged to swear on a cross, or on the Gospels, that the cross is sacred because on it he was crucified who for- bade us to swear, and that when taking an oath one perhaps kisses, as what is sacred, the very place 1 in the book where it clearly and definitely says : Swear not at all . But this effrontery no longer disconcerted me. I saw clearly that in Matt, v., verses 33 to 37, a definite and practicable third commandment is clearly expressed : Never take an oath to any one, anywhere, about anything. Every oath is extorted for evil ends. Following this third commandment comes a fourth reference and a fourth commandment (Matt. v. 38-42 ; Luke vi. 29, 30) : 4 Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth : but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil : but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain.2 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away/

I have already spoken of the direct and definite meaning of these words, and of the 1 In Russian Courts the oath was administered on the open Gospels. 2 If Christ wished to lay down that it is wrong ever to use physical force to prevent any man from doing what he wishes to do (and that is the rule Tolstoy deduces) it is curious that Christ gives here an illustration of going two miles with a man who demands that you accompany him one ; for, with reference to the second mile, there is clearly no reference to the use of physical force, any more than in the following example of lending to him who asks. fact that we have no right to give them an allegorical interpretation. The commentaries on these words, from St. John Chrysostom’s till to-day, are truly amazing. These words please everybody, and in references to them they make all kinds of profound conjectures, excepting one only, namely, that the words have their plain meaning. The Church commentators, not at all embarrassed by the authority of him whom they call God, most calmly restrict the meaning of his words. They say : 4 It is, of course, understood that all these commandments about enduring wrongs, about renouncing revenge, are in fact directed against the Jewish spirit of relentlessness, and do not prohibit either public measures for restricting evil and punishing evil-doers , or the private, personal exertions and efforts of each individual to maintain the inviolability of his rights, to correct wrong-doers, and to deprive ill-intentioned men of the possibility of harming others ; for otherwise the spiritual laws of the Saviour would themselves, in the Jewish way, become mere words, and might serve to promote the success of evil and the suppression of virtue. A Christian’s love should be like God’s love ; but the divine love refrains from limiting and punishing evil only so long as it remains within limits more or less innocuous to God’s glory and to the safety of one’s neighbours ; in the contrary case evil should be limited and punished, a duty which is specially incumbent on the Government.’ (The Annotated Gospel of the Archimandrite Michael, which is all

based on the commentaries of the Fathers of the Church). The learned and freethinking Christians are also not embarrassed by the meaning of Christ’s words, and correct him. They say that this is a very lofty saying, but one lacking in any possible application to life ; for an application to life of the law of nonresistance to evil destroys the whole order of life, which we have so admirably arranged : so say Renan, Strauss, and all the freethinking commentators. But one need only take the words of Christ as we take those of the first man we meet and who speaks to us — that is to say, assume that he means what he says, to do away with the necessity for any profound conjectures. Christ says : I consider that your method of securing your life is stupid and bad. I propose to you quite another method, as follows. And he speaks the words given in Matthew v. 38-42. It would seem that, before correcting those words, one should understand them. But that is just what no one wishes to do, having decided hi advance that the order of our life which is infringed by those words is a sacred law of humanity.

I did not consider our life either good or sacred, and therefore understood that commandment sooner than other people. And when I had understood the words as they are spoken, I was amazed by their truth, exactitude and clarity. Christ says : ‘You wish to destroy evil by evil. That is unreasonable. That there should be no evil, do none.’ And then he enumerates the cases in which we are accustomed to do evil, and says that in these cases it should not be done. This fourth commandment of Christ was the first I understood, and it was the one which disclosed to me the meaning of all the others. This fourth, simple, clear, practicable commandment says : Never resist the evil-doer by force, do not meet violence with violence. If they beat you, endure it ; if they take your possessions, yield them up ; if they compel you to work, work, and if they wish to take from you what you consider to be yours — give it up. And following that fourth commandment comes a fifth reference to the old law, and the fifth commandment (Matt. v. 43-8) : 4 Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy [Lev. xix. 17, 18] : but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you : that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven : for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye ? do not even the publicans the same ? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others ? do not even the Gentiles the same ? Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’

Those verses formerly seemed to me to be an explanation, completion, and enforcement ~I would even say an exaggeration— of the precept about not resisting the evil-doer. But, having found a simple, applicable, and definite meaning in each passage that began with a reference to the ancient law, I anticipated that the same would be the case here. After each quotation a law was announced, and each verse of the commandment had a meaning and could not be omitted, and so it should be here also. The concluding words, repeated by Luke, that God does not make distinctions between people, but sends His blessings upon ail, and that you therefore should be like God, not making distinctions between people, and should not do as the Gentiles do, but should love all men and do good to all alike — those words were clear, and they appeared to me to be like a confirmation and explanation of some definite rule ; but what that rule was it was long before I could discern. To love one’s enemies. That seemed impossible. It was one of those beautiful phrases which can only be regarded as indications of an unattainable moral ideal. It was either too much, or nothing at all. One could abstain from injuring an enemy, but to love him was impossible. Christ could not prescribe an impossibility. Besides that, the very first words, the reference to the ancient law, 4 Ye have heard that it was said : Thou shall hate thine enemy , were questionable.-' In previous passages Christ quotes the actual, precise words of the Mosaic law ; but here he uses

words which had never been uttered. He appears to misrepresent the law. As in the case of my former perplexities, the commentaries on the Gospels explained nothing to me. They all admit that the words, * ‘ Thou shalt hate thine enemy,’ do not occur in the Mosaic law, but no explanation of this incorrect citation is given. They speak of the i difficulty of loving enemies and bad people ; and in most cases they correct Christ’s words, and say it is impossible to love one’s enemies, but possible not to wish them evil or to do them harm ; incidentally it is suggested that one may and should expose, that is to say oppose, one’s enemies ; mention is made of various degrees of attainability of this virtue ; so that the ultimate deduction to be made from the Church commentaries is that Christ, for some unknown reason, made an incorrect, citation of the Mosaic law and uttered many beautiful, but really empty and inapplicable, words. It seemed to me that this was unsatisfactory. There should be some clear and definite meaning here, as in the first four commandments. And, to understand this meaning, I first of all tried to understand the meaning of the incorrect citation from the law : hate your enemies . It is not for nothing that Christ, before each of his injunctions, quoted the words of the law : ‘ Thou shalt not kill, shalt not commit adultery,’ &c., and contrasted those words with his own doctrine. Without understanding what was alluded to in the words he cites from the old law one cannot understand what he

enjoined. In the commentaries it is plainly ( said, what cannot but be admitted, that he ! r cites words which are not found in the law ; ! f but it is not explained why he did so, nor what t this incorrect citation means. It seemed to f me that one had first to explain what Christ 1 may have meant when he cited those words j i which do not occur in the law. And I asked j c myself : What can . the words mean which j 1 Christ has incorrectly quoted from the Mosaic j e law ? In all his former citations of the law j i only one precept of the ancient law is quoted, ‘ as : ‘ Thou shalt not kill ; Thou shalt not ! c commit adultery ; Thou shalt not forswear 1 thyself ; A tooth for a tooth/ And in con- i nexion with that single precept, Christ’s corre- j sponding doctrine is announced. Here, however, 3 two precepts are cited, and contrasted one with ] the other ; ‘ Ye have heard that it was said, i Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine i enemy/ so that evidently the basis of the new r law should deal with the difference between t the two injunctions of the ancient law in re- j t ference to neighbours and enemies. And to j

understand more clearly wherein that difference lay, I asked myself : What do the words ‘ neigh- c hour ’ and c enemy 5 mean in Gospel language ? ! \ And, on consulting the dictionaries and con- j cordances of the Bible, I convinced myself ! 1 that ‘ neighbour/ when used by a Jew, always j i meant, and only meant, a Jew. That meaning j r of ‘ neighbour 5 is found also in the Gospel c parable of the Good Samaritan. According ( to the view of the Jewish lawyer, who asked Ij 4 Who is my neighbour ? ’ a Samaritan could not be a neighbour. A similar definition of 4 neighbour ’ is given in Acts vii. 27. 4 Neigh- bour/ in the language of the Gospels, means fellow-countryman, a man of one’s own people. Therefore, surmising that the contrast Christ is setting up in this passage by citing the words of the law, 4 Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy/ lies in the contrast of fellow-countrymen with foreigners, I asked myself what was an i 4 enemy J in the Jewish conception, and I found confirmation of my conjecture. The word 4 enemy ’ is used in the Gospels almost always in the sense, not of a personal foe, but of a public, national enemy (Luke i. 71-74; Matt, xxii. 44 ; Mark xii. 36 ; Luke xx. 43, &c.). The singular number used for the word 4 enemy ’ in these verses, in the phrase 4 hate thine enemy/ indicated to me that the national enemy is referred to. The singular number refers to the collective whole of the enemy people. In the Old Testament the conception of a hostile people is always expressed in the singular.

And, as soon as I understood this, the difficulty was immediately removed as to why and how Christ, after previously always quoting the precise words of the law, could here cite words which had never been uttered. I had only to understand the word 4 enemy ’ in the sense of national enemy, and 4 neighbour , in the sense of compatriot, for that difficulty to disappear. ' Christ speaks of how, in the Mosaic law, the Jews were told to treat their national enemy. All those passages, scattered through different books of the Bible, in which they are bidden to oppress, slay, and exterminate other tribes, Christ sums up in the one expression, to ‘ hate ' — to harm — the enemy. And he says : Ye have heard that it was said that you should love your own people and hate your nation's enemy ; but I say to you that you should love all men without discrimination of the race to which they belong. And as soon as I understood the words in this way, the other and chief difficulty was disposed of, as to how one should understand the words, ‘ love your enemies/ It is impossible to love one's personal enemies. But one can love a hostile people in the same way that one does one's own. And it became plain to me that Christ is speaking of the fact that every one is taught to consider the people of his own race as his 4 neighbours,' and to consider other nations as ‘ enemies,' but that he bids us not to do so. He says : The law of Moses makes a distinction between Jews and Gentiles, the national enemy, but I say unto you, that you should not make that distinction. And, in fact, both in Matthew and Luke, following this commandment, he says that before God all men are equal ; the sun rises and the rain falls for them all. God does not distinguish between the peoples, but does good to all alike ; so should men also do to all without distinction of nationality, and not as the Gentiles, who divide themselves into different nations.

So that, once again, from different sides a plain, important, clear, and applicable meaning of Christ's words confirmed itself for me. Again, instead of misty expressions of vague philosophy, a clear, definite, important, and practicable rule discloses itself : not to make distinctions between one's own and other nations, and not to do all the things that flow from making such distinctions ; not to bear enmity to foreign nations ; not to make war nor to take part in warfare; not to arm oneself for war, but to behave to all men, of whatever race they may be, as we behave to our own people. This was all so clear and simple that I was astonished I had not understood it immediately. The cause of my not having understood it was the same as the cause of my not having promptly understood the prohibition of law-courts and of oaths. It was very difficult to understand that those courts — which are opened with a religious ceremony, and blessed by those who consider themselves the guardians of Christ's teaching— that those same courts are incompatible with a confession of Christ, being directly opposed to him. Yet more difficult was it to guess that the very oath administered to all men by the guardians of the law of Christ is directly prohibited by that law ; but to guess that what in our life is considered not merely necessary and natural, but most excellent and brave — the love of one's fatherland, its defence, its exaltation, resistance to its enemies, and so forth — are not merely offences against the law of Christ but a plain repudiation of it — to guess that this is so, was very difficult. Our life has so diverged

from the teaching of Christ that that very divergence has become the chief hindrance to our understanding his teaching. We have so disregarded and forgotten all he said about our way of life — his injunction not merely not to kill, but not even to hate any man ; not to defend ourselves but to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies — that now, being accustomed to call people who devote their lives to killing, the Christ-loving army,1 being accustomed to hear prayers addressed to Christ for victory over our enemies, to pride ourselves on slaying, and having made of the sword a holy symbol of murder (until a man without a sword, without a dagger, is a man to be held in contempt)— it now seems to us that Christ did not forbid war, and that if he had forbidden it he would have said so more explicitly. We forget that Christ could not imagine people believing in his teaching of humility, love, and universal brotherhood, quietly and deliberately organizing the murder of their brother men. Christ could not imagine that, and therefore could not forbid Christians to go to war, any more than a father, when giving his son instructions to live honestly, to wrong no one, and to give to others, could bid him abstain from highway robbery. No one of the apostles or disciples of Christ during the first centuries of Christianity could imagine that it was necessary to forbid Christians to commit the murders that

1 Or, if that Russian expression sounds strange in English, we might call it ‘ a Christian army.’ ! are called war. This, for instance, is what Origen says in his reply to Celsus ( The Writings of Origen : Origen contra Celsum, Lib. viii. c. 73. Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. xviii.). He says : ‘ And in the next place Celsus urges us to help the King with all our might, and to labour with him in the maintenance of justice, to fight for him ; and, if he requires it, to fight under him, or lead an army along with him. To this our answer is, that we do, when occasion requires, give help to Kings, and that, so to say, a divine help, “ putting on the whole armour of God/' And this we do in obedience to the injunction of the Apostle, “ I exhort , therefore, that first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, giving of thanks, be made for all men; for Kings and all that are in authority/' and the more any one excels in piety, the more effective help does he render to Kings, even more than is given by soldiers, who go forth to fight and slay as many of the enemy as they can. And to those enemies of our faith who require us to bear arms for the commonwealth, and to slay men, we repty : “ Do not those who are priests at certain shrines, and those who attend on certain gods, as you account them, # keep their hands free from blood that they may

I with hands unstained and free from human blood offer the appointed sacrifices to your I gods ? 5 And, finishing this chapter with an explan ation that Christians are of more use by their * peaceful life than are soldiers, Origen says : ‘ And none fight better for the King than we do. We do not indeed fight under him, although he require it/ Such was the attitude of the Christians of the first centuries towards war, and so did their teachers speak when addressing those powerful in the world ; and they spoke so when hundreds and thousands of martyrs were perishing for professing the Christian faith. And now ? Now no question is asked as to whether a Christian can take part in war. All young men, educated in the teaching of the Church which is called Christian, when the time comes each autumn, present themselves at the Army Office and, with the assistance of Church pastors, violate the law of Christ. Only recently one peasant turned up who on Gospel grounds refused military service. The teachers of the Church expounded to him his error ; but, as the peasant believed not them but Christ, he was put into prison and kept there till he renounced Christ. And all this is done 1,800 years after a quite clear and definite commandment was announced to Christians by our God : Do not consider the people of other nations to be enemies, but account all men as brothers, and treat them as you treat people of your own nation : and therefore, not only do not kill those whom you call your enemies, but love them and do good to them.

And having so understood these very simple, definite commands of Christ, not subjected to any interpretation, I asked myself : How would it be if the Christian world believed in these commandments, not in the sense that they must be sung or read for the propitiation of God, but that they must be obeyed for the welfare of man ? How would it be if people believed in the duty of keeping these commandments as firmly as they believe, for instance, that one must say one's prayers every day, go to Church every Sunday, avoid flesh food on Fridays, and fast every Lent ? How would it be if people believed these commandments even as much as they believe in the demands made by the Church ? And I pictured to myself the whole of Christendom living and educating the young according to these commandments. I pictured * to myself that it was inculcated to us all and to our children from childhood upwards, by word and by example, not as now, that a man must maintain his dignity and preserve his rights against others (which can only be done by humiliating and offending others), but it was inculcated that no man has any rights, or can be superior or inferior to another ; and that he only is inferior to all and most ignoble who desires to set himself above others ; that them is no more humiliating condition for a man than that of being angry with another ; and that my conviction that someone is insignificant or mad

* cannot justify my anger against him, or my strife with him. Instead of all the arrangements of our life, from the shop -windows to the theatres, novels, and women's dresses, which excite sexual desire, I imagined to myself that it was suggested to us and to our children, by I word and deed, that to amuse oneself with voluptuous books, theatres and balls is the basest kind of amusement, and that every act which has for its aim to adorn or show off the body is the very basest and most shameful of acts. Instead of the organization of our life, in which it is considered necessary and good that a young man should be dissolute until he marries, and instead of a way of life that separates married couples being considered most natural ; instead of the legalization of a class of women set apart for the service of depravity ; instead of the admission of, and the sanctification of, divorce,— instead of all this, I imagined to myself that it was instilled into us by word and deed that the condition of a man who has reached the age for sexual relations and has not renounced them, but yet remains single and unmarried, is an abnormity and a shame, and that a man's desertion of her with whom he has come together and the exchanging of her for another, is not only an unnatural action, like incest, but is a cruel, inhuman action. Instead of our whole life being founded on violence, instead of each of us being punished or punishing from childhood to advanced old age, I imagined to myself that it was instilled into us all by word and deed that revenge is a most degrading animal feeling, and that violence is not merely a shameful thing but one which deprives a man of true happiness, and that the only happiness of life is such as need not be defended by violence, and that the highest respect is deserved, not by him who takes or retains what is his from others, but by him who gives up the most and serves others most. Instead of it being con-

isidered admirable and right that each man should be sworn in, and should surrender all that he holds most valuable — that is to say, his whole life — to the will of he knows not whom, I imagined that it was instilled into all, that man’s reasonable will is that highest sanctuary which he may yield to no one else, and that to bind oneself by oath to any one, and about [anything, is a repudiation of one’s rational being and a defilement of that highest sanctuary. I pictured to myself that, instead of these national j enmities which are instilled into us under the guise of love of one’s country, and instead of those applauded slaughters called war, which from childhood are represented to us as the most heroic deeds— I imagined that we were imbued with horror at, and contempt for, all those activities, political, diplomatic, and military, which promote the separation of peoples ; and that it was suggested to us that the recognition of any kingdoms, exclusive laws, frontiers, or territories is an indication of most savage ignorance ; and that to go to war— that is to say, to kill people, people personally unknown to us, without any grounds — is the most horrible villany, to which only a lost and perverted man, degraded to the level of a beast, can descend. I pictured to myself that all men believed this, and I asked : What would be the result 1

Formerly I had asked myself what would result from putting Christ’s teaching, as I then understood it, into practice, and had involuntarily replied : Nothing. We shall all pray, receive the blessings of the sacraments, believe in the i( redemption and in salvation for ourselves and 0 for the whole world through Christ, and nevertheless that salvation will come about, not from (J what we do, but because the end of the world will j arrive. Christ will come in his own time, in gi glory, to judge the living and the dead and n establish the kingdom of God, independently of our life. Now Christ’s teaching, as it had re- g vealed itself to me, had another meaning, and h the establishment of the kingdom of God on 1 earth depended on us also. The fulfilment of il Christ’s teaching, expressed in the five command- j s ments, would establish the kingdom of God. i The kingdom of God on earth is the peace of all i men one with another. Peace among men is the highest blessing attainable by man on earth, i So did the kingdom of God present itself to all j the Hebrew prophets. And so has it presented 1 itself, and does present itself, to the heart of i every man. All the prophecies promise peace to < mankind.

The whole of Christ’s teaching consists in giving the kingdom of God, that is peace, to man. In the Sermon on the Mount, in the talk with Nicodemus, in his charge to his disciples, and in all his sermons, Christ speaks only of the things that divide men and hinder them from being at peace and entering the kingdom of God. All the parables are but a description of what the kingdom of God is, and an explanation that only by loving one’s brother-men and being at peace with them can one enter it. John the Baptist, Christ’s forerunner, said that the king- dom of God was drawing near, and that Jesus Christ would give it to the world. Christ says that he brought peace on earth (John xiv. 27) : ‘ Peace I leave with you ; my peace I give unto you : not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled* neither let it be fearful.5 And those five commandments of his really give man this peace. All five commandments have but that one aim — peace among men. Men need only trust Christ’s teaching, and obey it, and there will be peace on earth ; and not such a peace as men devise, temporary, accidental, and partial, but a general peace, inviolable and eternal.

The first commandment says : Be at peace with all men ; do not allow yourself to consider any man insignificant or senseless (Matt. v. 22). If peace be infringed, employ all your strength to restore it. The service of God is the abolition of enmity (Matt. v. 23, 24). Be reconciled after the least difference, in order not to lose the true life. In this commandment everything is said ; but Christ foresees the snares of the world which disturb peace among men, and he gives the second commandment, against the snare of sexual relations, which disturb peace. Do not regard the beauty of the flesh as an amusement ; avoid this snare in advance (verses 28-30) ; let ja man take one wife, and a woman one husband, and on no account abandon one another (32). Another snare is the oath, which leads men into sin. Know in advance that this is evil, and take no vows (34—37). The third snare is revenge* calling itself human justice. Do not avenge yourself, and do not excuse yourself on the ground that you are wronged ; bear with wrongs, and do not return evil for evil (38-42). The fourth snare is the difference of nationalities — the enmity of tribes and states. Know that all men are brothers, sons of one God ; and do not infringe peace with any one for the sake of national aims (43-48). If people do not fulfil my one of those commandments, peace will be listurbed. If people fulfil all these commandments, the kingdom of peace will have come on earth. The commandments exclude all evil from the life of man.

With the fulfilment of these commandments the life of men will be such as every human heart seeks and desires. All men will be brothers, and everyone will be at peace with others, enjoying all the blessings of the world during the term of life appointed him by God. Men will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks. Then the kingdom of God will have come : that kingdom of peace promised by all the prophets, which drew nigh in the days of John the Baptist, and which Christ foretold and proclaimed in the words of Isaiah : 4 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor ; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised ; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord ’ (Luke iv. 18, 19 ; Isaiah lxi. 1, 2). The commandments of peace, given by Christ, are simple and clear ; they foresee all causes of strife and, by averting it, they throw open the kingdom of God on earth. Therefore Christ is actually the Messiah. He has fulfilled that which was promised. It is we who do not carry out what all men have always desired, though it is that for which we have prayed and still pray.

Christ’s teaching — false doctrine— man Why do people not act as Christ told them to, and in the way that gives them the greatest bliss attainable by man, such as they have ever longed for and still long for ? From all sides I hear one and the same reply, differently expressed : 4 The teaching of Christ is very good, and it is true that were it fulfilled the kingdom of God w^ould be established on earth : but it is difficult, and therefore impracticable.5 Christ’s teaching of how men should live is divinely true, and gives men blessedness ; but it is hard for them to obey it. We so often repeat this, and hear it, that the contradiction contained in the words no longer strikes us. It is accordant with human nature to seek for what is best, and every teaching for the guidance of man’s life is a teaching of what is best. If men are shown what is best for them, how can they say that they desire to do what is best, but cannot ? Man’s rational activity, since mankind existed, has been directed to finding out what is best among the contradictions that fill the individual life and the life of humanity in general.

Men fight for land, for things they desire, and then divide everything up and call it property ; they consider that though this is difficult to institute, yet it is better so, and they hold on to property ; men fight for wives and abandon children, and then conclude that it is better that* each man should have his own family ; and, though it is very difficult to provide for a family, people retain property and family and much else. And as soon as people considered that it was better so, then, however difficult it might be, they did it. What then do we mean when we* say, The teaching of Christ is admirable, lifeaccording to Christ’s teaching is better than the life we live, but we cannot live in the better wa y because it is difficult ? If one understands difficult to mean that it is difficult to sacrifice the momentary satisfaction of desire for the sake of a great good, then why do we not say that it is difficult tcp plough in order to obtain grain for bread, or to plant apple-trees in order to get apples ? That i it is necessary to overcome difficulties to gain a ' great advantage is known to every being en- | dowed with the rudiments of reason. And yet i we say that Christ’s teaching is admirable, but 1 impracticable, because it is difficult. Difficult j because, following it, we must deny ourselves something we had till then. It is as if we had never heard that it is sometimes better to endure:

; and forgo than to suffer nothing and always satisfy our lusts. Man may be an apimal, and no one need reproach him for that ; but a man cannot arguo that he wishes to be merely an animal. As soon as he argues he acknowledges that he is a rational being, and, admitting that, he cannot but acknowledge what is reasonable and unreasonable. Reason enforces nothing ; it only sheds light. In the dark I hurt my hand and my knee seeking the door. A man enters with a light, and I see the door. I need then, when I see the door, no longer knock myself against the wall, and still less is it reasonably possible to assert that I see the door and consider it better to pass through the door, but that it is difficult to do so, and I therefore wish to continue to knock my knee against the wall. In this extraordinary argument that the Christian teaching is desirable for and beneficial to the world, but that men are weak, men are bad, and continue to do worse though they wish to do better, and that they can therefore not do better, there is an obvious misunderstanding.

It is evidently not a mere error in argument, but something else. There must here be some false perception. Only a false opinion that that is which is not, and that that is not which is, could bring people to such a strange denial of the practicability of that which they admit gives them blessedness. The false perception which has led to this is what is called the dogmatic Christian faith — the very thing that all who profess the Christian faith according to the Church learn from childhood in the various Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Catechisms. That faith, as defined by believers, is ‘the giving substance to things hoped for 9 (this is said by Paul, and repeated in all the theological works and catechisms, as the best definition of faith). And it is this acknowledgement of the unreal as real that has led people to the strange assertion that Christ's teaching is good for men, 1 but does not suit men. The teaching of this faith, in its exact expression, is as follows : A personal God, ever existing, One in Three Persons, suddenly decided to create a world of spirits. The good God created this world of spirits for their good ; but it happened that one of the spirits became bad of himself and therefore unhappy. Much time passed, and God created another world, a material world, and in it man, also for man's own benefit. God created man blessed, immortal, and sinless. The blessedness of man consisted in enjoying the good of life without labour ; his immortality consisted in this, that he should always so live ; his ^inlessness consisted in his not knowing evil.

This man was tempted in paradise by that spirit of the first creation who had made himself bad, and from that time man fell, and bore | similar fallen children ; and from that time j: people began to work, bear sickness, suffer, die, and struggle physically and spiritually ; | that is to say, this imaginary man became real, such as we lmow him, and such alone as we have any right or reason to imagine him to be. Man's condition, labouring, suffering, choosing good, and avoiding evil, and dying — that condition which exists, and other than which we cannot imagine — according to the teaching ! of of this faith, is not man's real position, but an i p unnatural, accidental, and temporary position. | n Although this condition continued for every- j body, as this teaching tells us, from the banish- | ment of Adam from paradise — that is to say, from the commencement of the world, till the ' f birth of Christ, and continues in just the same way for everybody since then, yet believers have to suppose this to be only an accidental, temporary condition. According to this teaching, the Son of God, being himself God, the Second Person of the Trinity, was sent by God to earth in human form to save men from that condition which was for them accidental and temporary, and to free them from all the curses which that same God had put upon them for Adam's sin, and in order to reinstate them in their former natural condition of blessedness — that is to say, in freedom from disease and in immortality, sinlessness, and idleness. The Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, by the fact that people executed him, according to this teaching, redeemed Adam's sin and terminated man's unnatural condition, which had i lasted since the beginning of the world. And I since then a man who believes in Christ has again become such as he was in paradise — that is to say, immortal, free from disease, sinless, and idle.

fj|0n that part of the accomplishment of the redemption in consequence of which, since ; Christ, the earth has everywhere brought forth j its fruits without labour, by which sickness has ceased, and children have been born without pain to their mothers— the teaching does not much insist ; for, however much they may believe, it is difficult to instil into people who find it hard to toil and painful to suffer a perception that it is not hard to work nor painful to suffer. But that part of the teaching according to which death and sin are annulled is most strongly insisted on. It is stated that the dead continue to live. And as the dead are quite unable to affirm that they have died or that they are alive, just as a stone cannot affirm that it can or cannot speak, the absence of a denial is accepted as a proof ; and it is asserted that those who have died have not died. With yet greater solemnity and confidence is it asserted that, since Christ came, man, by faith in him, is freed from sin — that is to say, that since Christ's time a man need no longer shed the light of reason on his path through life, and choose what is best. He only need believe that Christ has redeemed him from sin, and then he is always sinless — that is to say, completely good. According to this teaching people should imagine that reason in them is powerless, and that therefore they are sinless — that is to say, cannot make a mistake.

A true believer should imagine that, since the time of Christ, the earth yields her produce without labour, children are bom painlessly, there are no diseases, no death, and no sins — that is to say, no mistakes — in other words, that that which is, is not, and that which is not, is. That is what is said by strictly logical theo- i 1 logical theory. $ That teaching, taken by itself, seems harm- fc less. But divergence from the truth never ® is harmless, but produces consequences that d are the more important, the more important ti is the subject misrepresented. In this case tl the subject of the falsehood is the whole life 1 of humanity. What in this teaching is called true life is li personal, blissful, sinless, and eternal — that is t to say, life such as no one has ever known s and such as does not exist. Life as it exists, c such as alone we know, the life we live and all * humanity has lived and is living, is according to this teaching a fallen, bad life, merely a simulacrum of the good life proper to us. The struggle between the inclination towards an animal life and a rational life, which lies in the soul of each man and forms the essence of each life, is completely set aside by this teaching. That struggle is relegated to an event which happened to Adam in paradise j at the time of the creation. And the question ! whether I should eat or should not eat those apples which tempt me does not exist for us, according to this teaching. The question was decided once and for all by Adam in paradise in a negative sense. Adam sinned for me — that is to say, he made a mistake, and all men, all of us, fell irreparably, and all our attempts to live rationally are useless and even irreligious.

I am incorrigibly bad, and ought to know it. And my salvation does not depend on the fact that I can enlighten my life by reason and, recognizing good and evil, can choose the better path. No ; Adam has once and for all done for me what was bad, and Christ has, once and for all, corrected that evil done by Adam, and therefore I, as a spectator, should grieve for the fall of Adam and rejoice in the redemption by Christ. All the love of goodness and truth which lies in the soul of man, all his efforts, by reason, to shed light on life's phenomena, all man's spiritual life, is not merely unimportant, according to this teaching, but is a snare or an arrogance. Life such as we have on earth, with all its joys and beauties, with all its struggles of reason against darkness — the life of all who have lived before me, and my whole life with its inner strivings and victories of reason, is not a true life, but a fallen, hopelessly perverted life ; while the true, sinless life, is in faith — that is in imagination, that is to say, in insanity.

Let a man, setting aside the habit he has retained from childhood of accepting all this, try to look simply and straight at this teaching ; let him transform himself mentally into a new man, educated outside the range of this teaching, and let him imagine what it would appear like to such a man. Surely, it is utter insanity.1 1 Tolstoy’s statement of Church doctrines is not one that Churchmen will readily accept, but it should be borne in mind that he had primarily in view the And, strange and terrible as it was to think j so, I could not but admit that it is so ; for this alone explained to me the amazing, contradictory, senseless objection which I hear from all j sides as to the practicability of Christ's teaching : 1 It is good , and would bring happiness to men , but \ men cannot fulfil it. Only the representation as existent of that ! which does not exist, and as non-existent of that which does exist, could lead to this astonishing contradiction. And such a false representation I found in the pseudo-Christian faith, which has been preached for 1,500 years.1 But the objection to Christ's teaching (that it is good, but impracticable) is made not only by believers but also by unbelievers, by people who do not believe, or think they do not believe, in the dogma of the fall and redemption. The objection to Christ's teaching on the score of its impracticability is made also by scientists, philosophers, and in general by people who are educated and consider themselves quite free from any superstition, and who do not believe, or think they do not believe, in anything ; and who therefore consider themselves free from the superstitions of the fall and the redemption. And so at first it seemed to me. I too thought that these learned people

Russo-Greek Church at a particularly somnolent and subservient period, and also the fact that in the early ’eighties, when he was writing this book, religious opinions were still current to which the assent of no educated man is likely to be demanded to-day. 1 Tolstoy counts from the First General Council of f Christians at Nicsea, under Constantine, in a.d. 325. had other grounds for their denial of the practicability of Christ's teaching. But, on penetrating deeper into the reason of their denial, I became convinced that the non-believers have the same false perception, that our life is not what it is, but is what they imagine it to be ; and that this conception rests on the same basis as the believers' conception. Those who consider themselves unbelievers do not, it is true, believe in God, nor in Christ, nor in Adam ; but in the fundamental, false conception of man's right to a blissful life, on which everything rests, they believe as firmly, or even more firmly, than the theologians. However much privileged science and philosophy may boast themselves, asserting that they are the guides and directors of man's mind— they are not the directors but the servants. A ready-made outlook on life is always supplied to science by religion ; and science only works along the paths indicated to it by religion. Religion shows man the meaning of life, and science and philosophy apply this meaning to various sides of life. And therefore, if religion gives a false meaning to life, science, educated to that religious outlook, will apply that false perception to the various phases of human life. And that is what has happened with our European-Christian science and philosophy.

Church teaching has presented the fundamental meaning of human life as being this, that man has a right to a blissful life, and that this bliss is not obtainable by man’s exertion but by something outside himself ; and this idea underlies all our science and philosophy. Religion, science, and public opinion, all with one voice declare that the life we lead is bad ; but that the teaching which shows how we ourselves can become better, and thereby make life better, is impracticable. The teaching of Christ, aiming at improving human life by man’s own reasonable efforts, is impracticable, says religion, because Adam j fell and the world is in an evil state. That teaching is impracticable because man’s life is regulated by certain laws which are independent of man’s will, says our philosophy. ; Philosophy and all science only repeat in other words just what religion announces by the dogma of original sin and redemption. In the doctrine of redemption there are two fundamental propositions on which everything depends : (1) Real human life is a blissful life, but life in the world here is a bad life, irreparable by any effort of man ; and (2) Redemption from I this life lies in faith.

These two propositions have come to underlie the outlook on life both of believers and of unbelievers in our pseudo-Christian society, j From the second proposition arose the Church, j with her institutions. From the first come our public opinion and our philosophic and political theories. All the philosophic and political theories that justify the existing order, Hegelianism and its children, are founded on that basis. Pessimism, demanding of life what life cannot ! give, and therefore repudiating life, also arose from it. Materialism, with its wonderful and enthusiastic assertion that man is a process and nothing else, is the lawful child of this doctrine which acknowledges life here to be a fallen life. Spiritualism, with its scientific followers, is the best proof that the scientific and philosophic outlook is not free, but based on the religious doctrine that a blissful eternal life is natural to man. This perversion of the meaning of life has perverted the whole rational activity of man. The dogma of man’s fall and redemption has hidden from men the most important and legitimate realm of human activity, and has shut out of the realm of human knowledge the knowledge of what man should do that he may become happier and better. Science and philosophy, imagining that they are counteracting pseudo-Christianity, and priding themselves thereon, are only serving it. Science and philosophy deal with anything you please, only not with the question how man can himself become better and lead a better life. What is called ethics — moral teaching — has quite disappeared from our pseudo -Christian society.

Neither believers nor unbelievers ask themselves how they should live, and how use the reason that has been given us ; but they ask : Why is our human life not such as we have imagined it should be, and when will it become what we desire ? Only as a result of that false teaching, absorbed into the flesh and blood of our generation, could such an astonishing thing occur as that man — as though he had spat out the apple of knowledge of good and evil, which tradition ca says he ate in paradise, and had forgotten that at the progress of mankind lies only in solving L the contradictions between our rational and ^ our animal natures — should set to work to ! f use his reason in discovering the historic laws ^ of his animal nature and of that alone. Except the philosophic teaching of our pseudo-Christian world, the religions and philosophic teachings of all the nations known to us — Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Brahminism, and the philosophy of the Greeks — all aim at arranging human life, and explaining to people how each one should strive to be better, and to lead a better life. All Confucianism consists in personal perfecting of oneself ; Judaism, in the personal following of each law of God ; Buddhism, in the teaching of how each man can save himself from the evil of life. Socrates taught the personal perfecting of oneself in the name of reason, and the Stoics acknowledged rational freedom as the only basis of a true life.

Man’s whole rational activity could not but consist, and has always consisted, in one thing — in illuminating by reason the striving towards what is good. Free-will, says our philosophy, is an illusion ; and it prides itself much on the boldness of this assertion. But free-will is not merely an illusion ; it is a phrase devoid of meaning. It is a phrase invented by the theologians and criminalists, and to refute that phrase is to tilt at windmills ; but reason — that which illumines our life and obliges us to alter our actions — is not an illusion and cannot be denied. To follow wisdom for the attainment of what is good — in that has always consisted the doctrine of the true teachers of humanity, and in that lies the whole teaching of Christ, and that, being reason, can in no way be rejected by reason. The teaching of Christ is the teaching of the son of man that is present in us all — that is to say, it is the teaching of the strife common to all men after what is good, and of the reason, shared by all, which illuminates that striving. (To prove that 4 the son of man ’ means 4 son of man ’ is quite superfluous. To understand by 4 son of man ’ something else instead of what the words mean, one would have to show that Christ, to indicate what he meant to say, intentionally used words which have quite another meaning. But even if, as the Church wishes to make out, 4 son of man 5 means son of God, even then 4 son of man ’ also essentially means man, for Christ calls all men the sons of God.)

Christ’s teaching of the son of man— son of God — which forms the basis of all the Gospels, is expressed most clearly in his talk with Nicodemus. Each man, says he, besides consciousness of his personal life in the flesh, which proceeds from a male parent in the womb of his physical mother, cannot but be conscious of his birth from above (John iii. 5, 6, 7). That which man is conscious of in himself as free is that which is born of the eternal— that which we call God (w. 11, 14). That which is horn of God (the son of God in man) we should exalt in ourselves in order to attain true life (vv. 14,17). The son of man is the son of God ‘ of a like nature ’ (not ‘ only begotten ’). He who exalts in himself that son of God above all else, he who believes that life dwells only in that, will not be in discord with life. Discord with life results only because people do not believe in the light within themselves (vv. 18-21). (That light of which it is said in John’s Gospel that in it is life, and the life was the light of man.)

Christ taught us to exalt the son of man, who is the son of God and the light of men, above all else. He says : When you exalt [honour, raise up] the son of man, you will know that I speak nothing of myself (John xii. 32, 44, 49). The Jews did not understand his teaching, and asked : £ Who is this son of man, that must be lifted up V (John xii. 34) And to this question he replies (v. 35) : ‘Yet a little while is the light in you.1 Walk while ye have the light, that darkness overtake you not ; he that walketh in the darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.’ To the question, what 1 In all the Church’s translations an intentionally false rendering is given : instead of the words ‘ in you,’ wherever those words occur the rendering is given ‘ with you.’ — L. T. The English Authorized Version gives ‘ with you,’ but our Revised Version, published in 1881, gives 4 among you,’ and in a footnote adds the translation 4 in you ’ ; so that the meaning Tolstoy considers correct is not entirely inaccessible to English readers of the Gospel

is meant by 4 lift up the son of man/ Christ replies : Live in the light that is in man. The son of man, according to Christ’s reply, is that light in which men ought to walk while they have light within them. Luke xi. 35 : 4 Look therefore whether the light that is in thee be not darkness/ Matt. vi. 23 : 4 If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness ! * says he, teaching the multitude. Before and after Christ men have said the same thing : that a divine light dwells in man, v/hich has descended from heaven, and that that light is reason , and that one must serve it only, and by its aid seek for what is good. This was i said by the teachers among the Brahmans and by the Hebrew prophets, and by Confucius, and Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, and by all the true sages — not the compilers of philosophic theories, but those who sought truth for their own welfare and for that of all men.1 1 Marcus Aurelius says : ‘ Honour that which is more powerful than anything on earth, which rules and guides all men. Honour also that which is most powerful within thyself. The latter is like the former, because it uses what is within thee to guide thy life.’

Epictetus says : ‘ God sowed His seed not only in my father and grandfather, but in all that live on the earth, especially in those that reason, for they alone enter into relation with God, through the reason by which they are united with Him.’ In the book of Confucius it is said : ‘ The law of great science consists in developing and establishing the principle of the light of reason, which we have received from heaven.’ That proposition is repeated several times, and serves as the basis of Confucius’s teaching. — L. T. But suddenly, according to the dogma of a redemption, we admit that it is quite unneces- ^ sary to speak or think about this light within cj us. We must think, say the believers, about ^ the nature of each separate person of the ^ Trinity ; what sacraments must, or must not, ag be performed ; because the salvation of man f comes not from our efforts, but from the Trinity ^ and the correct observance of the sacraments. ^ We must think, say the non-believers, of the f laws which regulate the movements of infinitely small atoms of matter in infinite space and ^ infinite time ; but of what man’s reason f demands for his good there is no need to think, fj because the betterment of man’s condition ii a does not depend on him, but on general laws | which we discover.

I am convinced that a few centuries hence the so-called ‘ scientific ’ activity of our belauded recent centuries of European humanity will furnish an inextinguishable fund of mirth and pity to future generations. For some centuries the learned men of a small western part of the great continent were in a condition of epidemic madness, imagining that eternal blissful life belonged to them, and they occupied themselves with every kind of investigation as to how, and according to what laws, this life would come to them ; but they themselves did nothing, : and never thought of doing anything, to make their life better. And what will seem yet more pathetic to the future historian is that he j will find that these people had had a teacher who clearly and definitely indicated to them ; what they should do to live more happily, and that the words of this teacher were explained by some to mean that he would come on the ^ clouds to arrange everything, and by others that this teacher’s words were excellent but impracticable, because man’s life was not such as they wished it to be and therefore it was not l worth while to concern themselves with it, but man’s reason had to be directed to the investigation of the laws of life, without regard ; to what is good for man.

| The Church says : Christ’s teaching is impracticable because life here is but an imitation of true life ; it cannot be good, it is all evil. The best way to live such a life is to despise it and live by faith — that is, by imagining a future, blissful, eternal life, and to live here as one is living, and to pray. Philosophy, science, and public opinion say : Christ’s teaching is impracticable because man’s life depends not on that light of reason by which he can himself illuminate this life, but on general laws ; and therefore it is not necessary to illuminate this life by reason and to live in accord therewith, but one must live as one is living, firmly believing that, according to historical, sociological, and other laws of progress, after we have lived badly a very long time, our life will of itself become very good. People come to a farm, and there find everything necessary for their life : a house with all needful utensils, barns full of corn, cellars, vaults containing all kinds of supplies ; in the | yard are agricultural implements, tools, harness, horses, cows, sheep, and a complete inventory — all that is needful for a well-supplied life. People from various parts come to this farm and begin to make use of all they find there, each only for himself, not thinking of leaving anything either for those who are there with him in the house or for those who will come later. Each wishes to have everything for himself. Each hastens to make use of what he can seize, and the destruction of everything begins — strife and a struggle for possession. A milch cow, unshorn sheep and sheep bearing young, are killed for meat ; fires are fed with benches and carts, and people fight for milk and grain, and spill, scatter, and destroy more than they use. No one eats a morsel quietly ; he eats and snarls; a stronger than he comes and takes the piece away, and another takes it from him. Having tormented themselves, these people, beaten and hungry, leave the place. Again the master arranges everything in the place so that people could live quietly in it. Again in the farm there is abundance, and again passers-by come in ; but again there is a scrimmage and a fight ; all is wasted in vain ; and again, tormented and embittered, people go away, scolding, angry with their comrades and also with their host for having prepared the place badly and insufficiently. Again the good host rearranges the place so that people could live in it ; and again the same thing occurs, and again, and again, and again. Then in one of the fresh parties a teacher is found who says to the others, ‘ Brothers, we are not acting rightly. See how

many goods there are in the place, and how well it is all arranged ! There is enough for us all, : and there will be a surplus for those who come after us, only let us live reasonably. We will i not snatch from one another, but will help one another. Let us sow, and plough, and tend the cattle, and all will be able to live well.’ And it happened that some people understood . what the teacher said, and those who understood began to do as he bade them ; they ceased fighting and snatching from one another, and began to work. But the rest, who had either not heard the words of the teacher, or had heard 4 but did not believe him, did not follow his advice, but fought as before and spoilt their host’s goods and went away. Others came and the same thing occurred. Those who attended to the teacher ever repeated the same thing : ‘ Do not fight, do not destroy the host’s goods, 5 and it will be better for you all. Do as the teacher says.’ But there were still many who had not heard, or did not believe, and matters long went on in the old way. This was all comprehensible, and things might happen so as long as people did , not believe what the teacher said. But at last, it is told, a time came when all in the place had heard the teacher’s words, all understood them, and not only understood them butacknowledged that it was God Himself who spoke through the teacher, and that the teacher was himself God, and all believed every word the teacher spoke to be sacred. And it is told that after this, instead of all living as the teacher

advised, no one any longer refrained from the ^ brawls, and they started thrashing one another, ga and all began to say that we know now for ^ certain that it should be so and that nothing ! ar else is possible ! al What does it all mean ? Even cattle ar- | ^ range how to eat their fodder so that one should not disturb another, and men, having learnt j a how they might live better, and believing that I g God Himself ordered them to do so, live yet g worse, because they say it is impossible to live otherwise. These people have imagined ^ something that is not true. Well, what could ‘ these people at the farm have imagined, that J they, having believed the teacher’s words, : should continue to live as before, snatching from one another, fighting, and ruining the goods j and themselves ? The teacher had told them : ‘ Your life at this farm is bad ; live better and your life will become good ; 5 but they imagined that the teacher had condemned any kind of life at that farm, and had promised them another, a good life, not at that farm but somewhere else. And they decided that this farm was a temporary inn, and that it was not worth while arranging to live well in it, but that it was only necessary to be on the alert not to miss the good life promised in another place. Only so can the strange conduct of these people at the farm be explained who believed the teacher to be God, and of those others who ! considered him a wise man and his words to j be true, but continued to live as before, in contradiction to the teacher’s advice.

Men have heard all and understood all ; but have let slip past their ears that the teacher said that men must create their own happiness here, at this farm at which they have met ; and have imagined that this farm was an inn, and that the real one will be somewhere else. And from this has come their amazing argument that the words of the teacher were very admirable, and were even the words of God Himself, but that it was now difficult to obey them. If only people would cease from destroying themselves and expecting some one to come and help them — Christ on the clouds with the sound of trumpets, or an historic law, or a law of the differentiation and integration of forces ! No one will help them unless they help themselves. Nor need they even help themselves : if only they will cease to expect anything from heaven or from earth, and cease to destroy themselves.

But granting that Christ’s teaching is bene- j( ficial to the world — granting that it is rational ]] and that one has no reasonable right to reject it — 0 still, what can one man do in a world of those j who do not act on Christ’s law ? If all men \ suddenly agreed to fulfil Christ’s teaching, its observance would be possible ; but one man cannot go against the whole world. ‘ If,’ it is generally said, £ I alone in a world of those people who do not fulfil Christ’s law fulfil it : give away what I have, turn my cheek to the smiter without defending myself, do not even put in an appearance to take the appointed oaths, or when summoned to war, and if I submit to be plundered ; I shall, if I do not die of hunger, get beaten to death, or, if not beaten, imprisoned or shot. So I shall have sacrificed all my happiness in vain, and ruined ! my whole life.’ This reply is based upon the same misunderstanding as the reply about the impracticability of Christ’s teaching. It is what one usually hears said, and I myself agreed with it until I had quite emancipated myself from Church teaching, and so

became able to understand the full meaning □f Christ’s doctrine about life. Christ offers his teaching of life to redeem us from the ruinous life people live who do not follow his teaching ; and suddenly we declare that we should be glad to follow his teaching were we not sorry to ruin our life. Christ teaches as how to escape from our ruinous life, and we grudge the sacrifice of that ruinous life. It follows that we are far from considering our fife ruinous, but consider it something in our possession, real and valuable. In that acknowledgement of our present worldly life as a real thing, and something that is our own, lies the mistake which hinders a comprehension of Christ’s teaching. Christ was aware of this mistake, which causes people to consider this worldly life of theirs as something real that belongs to them ; and by a whole series of discourses and parables he showed them that they have no right to life, and possess no life till they obtain true life by rejecting the shadow they now call their ‘ life.’ In order to understand Christ’s doctrine of saving one’s life, one must first understand what was said by all the prophets, what was said by Solomon, by Buddha, and by all the sages of the world, concerning man’s personal life. One may, as Pascal expresses it, disregard the matter and carry a shield before one to hide the abyss of death towards which we are all running ; but one need only consider what man’s jisolated personal life is, to convince oneself that this whole life, if it be only a personal life, has

for each separate person no sense or meaning, ui but is a malicious mockery of one’s heart and t in reason and of all that is good in man. There- oi fore, to understand Christ’s teaching, one has ci first of all to bethink oneself and to consider. It It is necessary that in us ^rdvoia should take i place : that is what Christ’s forerunner, John; u the Baptist, when preaching, said to people! who were ensnared like ourselves. He said : c 4 First of all, repent — that is, bethink yourselves. 1 Even now is the axe laid to the root of the trees! t to cut them down. Death and destruction are j here, beside each one of you. Do not forget it : c bethink yourselves.’ And Christ, beginning t his teaching, says the same thing : 4 Repent, l or ye will all perish.’ t In Luke xiii. 1-5, Christ spoke of the destruc- g tion of the Gaiilaeans slain by Pilate, and he said : 4 Think ye that these Galileeans were i sinners above all the Galilaeans because they i have suffered these things ? I tell you, Nay : j but, except ye repent, ye shall all in like manner perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, think ye that they were offenders above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem ? I tell you, Nay : but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.’

Had he lived in our day, in Russia, he would have said : Think ye that those who were burnt in the circus at Berdichev, or those who perished at the Kukuevsky embankment 1 were worse than others ? You will all also perish 1 The reference is to two disasters which occurred in Russia at the time Tolstoy was writing this book. unless you bethink yourselves, and find that 1 in your life which does not perish. The death of those crushed by the tower, or burnt in the circus, horrifies you; but your death, just as terrible and as unavoidable, awaits you, and in vain do you try to forget it. If it comes unexpectedly it will be all the more terrible. He says (Luke xii. 54-7) : 4 When ye see a cloud rising in the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower ; and so it cometh to pass. And when ye see a south wind blowing, ! ye say, There will be a scorching heat ; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye know how to interpret the face of the earth and the heaven ; but how is it that ye know not how to interpret this time ? And why even concerning yourselves judge ye not what is right ? ’

You can forecast the weather by its indications; how is it you perceive not what will befall yourselves ? Avoid danger, safeguard your life as much as you please, and all the same, if Pilate does not kill you, a tower will fall on you, or, if neither Pilate nor the tower destroys you, you will die in your bed with yet greater suffering. Make a simple calculation, as worldly people do when they undertake anything : either to build a tower, or to go to war, or to erect a factory. They plan and toil at an undertaking that may have a reasonable end. Luke xiv. 28-31 : 4 For which of you, desiring to build a tower, doth not first sit down and count the cost, whether he have wherewith to complete it ? Lest haply, when he hath laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all that behold begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build and was not able to finish. Or what king, as he goeth to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand ? *

Is it not really senseless to work at something which, however much you may try, will never be accomplished ? Death will always come sooner than the completion of the tower of your worldly happiness. And if you know in advance that, however you may strive against death, not you, but he, will conquer, is it not better to refrain from struggling against it, and not to devote your life to what will certainly perish, but rather seek some undertaking which will not be destroyed by inevitable death ? Luke xii. 22-7 : ‘ And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat ; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. For the life is more than the food, and the body than the raiment. Consider the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap ; which have no store-chamber, nor barn ; and God feedeth them : of how much more value are ye than the birds ! And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit unto his stature ? If then ye are not able to do even that which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest ? Consider the lilies, how they grow : they toil not, neither do they spin ; yet I say unto you,

Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed dike one of these/ However much you may concern yourself about your body and your clothes, no one can add a single hour to his life.1 Is it not senseless, then, to concern yourself about something you cannot do ? You know very well that your life will end with death, and you exert yourself to safeguard your life by property. Life cannot be safeguarded by property. Understand that this is an absurd deception with which you delude yourself. The meaning of life cannot consist, Christ says, in what we possess and what we acquire — what is not ourselves ; it must consist in something else. He says (Luke xii. 15-21) : ‘ A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. The grounds of a certain rich man,' he says, ‘ brought forth plentifully : and he reasoned within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have not where to bestow my fruits ? And he said, This will I do : I will pull down my barns, and build greater ; and there will I bestow all my corn and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years ; take thine ease, eat, drink, be merry. But ' God said unto him, Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul required of thee ; and the

1 The word r/Xi/aa — age, time of life, is incorrectly translated ‘ stature.’ So the whole expression means : can add an hour to his life. — L. T. things which thou hast prepared, whose shall they be % So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God/ Death always, every instant, stands over you. And therefore (Luke xii. 35, 36, 38, 39, 40) : 4 Let your loins be girded about, and your lamps burning ; and be ye yourselves like unto men looking for their lord, when he shall return from the marriage feast ; that, when he cometh and knocketh, they may straightway open unto him. And if he shall come in the second watch, and if in the third, and find them so, blessed are those servants. But this ye know, that if the master of the house had known in what hour the thief was coming, he would have watched, and not have left his house to be broken through. Be ye also ready : for in an hour that ye think not the Son of' man cometh/ The parable of the virgins awaiting the bridegroom, and of the end of the age and the day of judgement — all these passages, in the opinion of all the commentators, besides relating to the end of the world, also relate to death, which stands always before us every hour.

Death, death, death awaits you every second. Your life passes in the presence of death. If you labour personally for your own future, you yourself know that the one thing awaiting you is— death. And that death ruins all you work for. Consequently life for oneself can have no meaning. If there is a reasonable life it must be found elsewhere ; it must be a life the aim of which does not lie in preparing further life for oneself. To live rationally, one nust live so that death cannot destroy life. ■r Luke x. 41 : ‘ Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things : but 3ne thing is needful/ All the innumerable things we do for our pwn future are unnecessary : it is all deception with which we delude ourselves. Only one thing is needful. From the day of man’s birth, his position is such that inevitable destruction awaits him — that is to say, a meaningless life and a meaningless death, unless he finds that one thing necessary for true life. It is that one thing s which Christ shows to men. He does not invent it, or promise to give it by his divine power; he only shows people that, together with that personal life which is certainly a deception, there must be something that is true and not a deception.

In the parable of the husbandmen (Matt, xxi. 33-42) Christ explains the source of the error which hides that truth from men, and causes them to mistake the phantom of life (their own personal life) for true life. Men, living in the cultivated garden of a householder, took it into their heads that they owned that garden. And from this false conception flowed a series of insensate and cruel actions performed by them, which ended in their expulsion, in their being ejected from ■ that life. In just such a way have we imagined that the life of each of us is his own personal possession, and that we have a right to it and can do with it as we please, bound by no t obligation to any one. And for us, having imagined this, a similar series of insensate j, and cruel actions and misfortunes is inevitable, ^ resulting in a similar expulsion from life, jy And as the husbandmen thought that the more ^ cruel they were, the better would they secure B( themselves (for instance, by killing the mes- f sengers and the householder's son), so we also 0 imagine that the more cruel we are, the better j we shall be safeguarded. Y

As the inevitable end of the husbandmen ^ who would not yield the fruit of the garden to D any one was that the householder expelled j them, so also will be the end of those who t imagine personal life to be real life. Death • drives them from life, replacing them by others ; g and this not as a punishment, but merely because they have not understood life. As j the dwellers in the garden had either forgotten or wished to ignore the fact that the garden was handed to them ready cultivated, hedged, and supplied with a well, and that some one had laboured there before, and therefore expected them to work ; so people living a personal j life have forgotten, or wish to forget, all that was done for them before their birth and is being done all the time they are alive, and j that something is therefore expected of them : ; they wish to forget that all the good things of life which they use have been given and are being given, and should therefore be passed on | and returned. \ This correction of the understanding of life, this fA€T dvoia is the corner-stone of Christ's teaching, as he said at the end of that parable. According to Christ's teaching, as the husbandmen in the garden they had not planted should have understood and realized that they owed more to the householder than they could repay, so we also should understand and feel that, from the day of our birth to our death, we are overwhelmingly in debt to others, to those who lived before us, those now living, and those who will live, and to that which was, is, and will be — the source of all things. They should understand that each hour of their life, while they retain it, they admit that obligation, and that therefore a man living for himself who denies that obligation uniting him with life and with the source of life, deprives himself of life, and must understand that, by living so, he, while wishing to save his life, destroys it — as was repeatedly said by Christ.

That only is true life which carries on the life of the past, promotes the welfare of the present, and prepares the welfare of the future. To participate in that life a man must forgo his own will and do the will of the Father of life, who has given life to the Son of man. In John viii. 35, Christ, again expressing the same thought, says that a slave who follows his own will and not the will of the master abideth not in the house for ever : only the Son, who fulfilleth the will of the Father, abideth for ever, The will of the Father of life is not the life fc of an individual man, but of the only Son of cl man, dwelling within men, and therefore a man fc preserves his life only when he takes his life ir as a loan, a talent entrusted to him by the Father j! a for the service of the life of all, and lives not ' h for himself but for the Son of man. t Matt. xxv. 14-46 : A master gave part of j li his property to each of his bondsmen, and, without giving them any instructions, left it them alone. Some of the bondsmen, though ! s they had received no orders from their master j as to the use of his property, understood that 1 it was not theirs but the master's, and that it i should increase ; and they worked for their i master. And those who worked for their < master became partakers in the master's life, ] but those who did not work were deprived of what had been given them.

The life of the Son of man is given to all men, and they are not told why it is entrusted to them. Some understand that life is not their own, but was received as a gift, and that they should serve the life of the Son of man ; and they live accordingly. Others, on the pretext of not understanding the aim of life, do not serve life. And those who serve life merge with the source of life ; while those who do not serve life are deprived of it. And (in verses 31 to 46) Christ tells us wherein the service of the Son of man consists, and what the reward of that service is. The Son of man, as Christ expressed it, will say like a king : ‘ Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the 6 kingdom, for ye gave me meat and drink, * clothed me, took me in and comforted me, b for I am ever one and the same, in you and e in these little ones, whom you have pitied r and to whom you have done good. You ■ have not lived the personal life, but the life of the Son of man ; therefore you have eternal 1 life/

Only of eternal life of that kind does Christ ^ teach in all the Gospels, and, strange as it may i sound to say it of Christ, who personally rose and promised resurrection to all, never did Christ by a single word assert a personal resurrection and personal immortality beyond the grave; and to the restoration of the dead in the kingdom of the Messiah, which the Pharisees taught, he gave a meaning which excluded the conception of personal resurrection. The Sadducees denied the restoration of the dead. The Pharisees acknowledged it, and it is now acknowledged by orthodox Jews. The restoration of the dead (and not the resurrection, as the word is incorrectly translated), according to the belief of the Jews, will be accomplished at the coming of the time of the Messiah and the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. And Christ, encountering this belief in a temporary, local, and corporeal j resurrection, denies it, and puts in place of it his teaching of eternal life in God. When the Sadducees, who did not acknowledge the restoration of the dead, asked Christ, whom they supposed to share the view of the Pharisees, ‘ To whom will the wife of the seven brothers

belong ? ’ he replied clearly and definitely on both points. He says (Matt. xxii. 29-32 ; Mark xii. 2427 ; Luke xx. 34-38) : 4 Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God.’ And, rejecting the Pharisees’ view, he says : The restoration of the dead is neither corporeal nor personal. Those who attain to a restoration from the dead become sons of God and live like the angels (the powers of God) in heaven (i.e. with God) ; and personal questions — such as whose wife a woman will be — cannot exist for them, for they, united with God, cease to be personalities. ■ ‘ As touching the restoration of the dead,’ says he, replying to the Sadducees, who only acknowledged earthly life, ‘ have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God % ’ In the book of Moses it is said that God from the bush spake unto Moses, saying, 4 1 am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ If God said to Moses that he is the God of Jacob, then Jacob is not dead for God, since God is the God of the living only, and not of the dead. For God , all are alive . And therefore, if there is a living God, that man also lives who has entered into communion with the ever-living: God.

Against the Pharisees Christ says that the restoration of life cannot be corporeal and personal. Against the Sadducees he says that, besides a personal and temporary life, there is also a life in communion with God. Christ denies the personal, the corporeal a resurrection,1 but acknowledges a restoration of life in a man who merges his life into God’s. , Christ teaches salvation from personal life and a places that salvation in the exaltation of the 1, Son of man and life in God. Uniting this teache ing of his with the Jewish doctrine of the i coming of a Messiah, he speaks to the Jews of i the raising of the Son of man from the dead, ? meaning by this, not a corporeal and personal restoration of the dead, but an awakening of i life in God. He never spoke of a corporeal, - personal resurrection. The best proof that he never preached the resurrection of man is furnished by the two solitary passages quoted by the theologians in proof of his having taught the doctrine of resurrection. These two passages are Matt. xxv. 31-46 and John v. 28, 29. The first of these speaks of the coming, i.e. of the restoration, the exaltation, of the Son of

1 Tolstoy her© adopts the views he attributes to Ohrist. Some years later his opinion on the subject svas somewhat modified. He came to lay less stress on the words attributed to Christ ; and his own experience was that the more he came to identify his aopes and efforts with doing the will of his Father n heaven, that is to say, with helping right to prevail, die crooked to become straight, and the rough places •smooth, here on earth — the less credible did it seem diat his existence could cease with the death of the dody. But he maintained that we neither know, nor can mow, what kind of existence awaits us in the future ; whether our personalities will persist, whether we shall merge into the infinite like drops into the ocean, whether we shall be reincarnated, or whether groups df those who have co-operated most closely together nay not merge with one another into one larger ndividuality. man (just as in Matt. x. 23) and therefore the t majesty and power of the Son of man are com- a pared to a king. In the second passage what s is spoken of is the restoration of true life here 8 on earth, as it is expressed in the preceding | < twenty -four verses.

One need only reflect on the meaning of | Christ’s teaching of eternal life in God, and recollect the teaching of the Hebrew prophets, to understand that if Christ wished to teach the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which was then only beginning to find a place in the Talmud and was a subject of dispute, he would have stated that doctrine clearly and definitely ; but, on the contrary, not only did he not do so, but he rejected it ; and not a single place can be found in any one of the Gospels which confirms that doctrine. The two passages referred to above mean something quite different. Of his own personal resurrection — strange as this may sound to people who have not themselves studied the Gospels — Christ never spoke at all ! If, as the theologians teach, the basis of Christian faith lies in the resurrection of Christ, one would think that the least one could wish would be that Christ, knowing that he would rise again and that this would constitute the chief dogma of the Christian faith, should at least once say so clearly and definitely. But not only did he not say so definitely and clearly, he never once, not one single time in all the canonical Gospels, even mentioned it ! What Christ taught was to exalt the Son of man ;

that is to say, the essential life of man, and to acknowledge oneself a son of God. Christ personified in himself a man acknowledging sonship to God (Matt. xvi. 13-20). He asked the disciples what men said of him — the Son of man ? The disciples replied that some considered him to be John the Baptist miraculously risen from the dead, or a prophet ; others, Elijah descended from heaven. ‘ But who do you say I am ? ’ asked he. And Peter, understanding Christ as he understood himself, replied : 4 Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ And Christ replied : ‘ Not flesh and blood hath revealed this unto thee, but our Father which is in heaven.’ That is to say, you have understood this not because you believed human explanations, but because you, recognizing yourself to be a son of God, have understood me. And, explaining to Peter that on this sonship to God the true faith rests, Christ warned the other disciples (v. 20) that they should not in future say that he, Jesus, was the Messiah. And after this Christ says that, notwithstanding the fact that he would be tortured and killed, the Son of man, knowing himself to be God’s Son, would nevertheless be re-established and triumph over all. And it is these words that are interpreted as a prediction of his resurrection !

John ii. 19-22 ; Matt, xii, 40 ; Luke xi. 30 ; Matt. xvi. 4-21 ; Mark viii. 31 ; Luke ix. 22 ; Matt. xvii. 23 ; Mark ix. 31 ; Matt. xx. 19 ; Mark x. 34 ; Luke xviii. 33 ; Matt. xxvi. 32 ; Mark xiv. 28. Those are all the fourteen passages which are understood as being predictions by Christ of his resurrection. In three of them what is spoken of is Jonah in the whale’s belly, and in one the reconstruction of the Temple. In the remaining ten passages it is said that the Son of man cannot be destroyed, but nowhere is there one word about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In none of these passages, in the original, does the word 4 resurrection 5 even occur. Give a man who does not know the theological interpretation, but who knows Greek, these passages to translate, and he will never translate them as they have been translated. In the original two different words are used in three passages ; the one is <m orrrjjju and the other lyelpw. One of these words means, 4 to upraise ’ ; the other means 4 to awaken,’ and, in the middle voice, 4 to wake up,’ 4 to rouse oneself.’ But neither the one nor the other ever, under any circumstances, can mean 4 to raise from the dead.’ In order fully to convince oneself that these Greek words, and the corresponding Hebrew word Kum , cannot mean 4 to raise from the dead,’ one need only compare the other passages in the Gospels where these words are used. They are used frequently and never translated by the words 4 to raise from the dead ’ ( auferstehen , ressusciter) ; such words did not exist in Greek or in Hebrew, nor was there the conception that corresponds to them. To express in Greek, or in Hebrew, the conception of resurrection one has to employ a circumlocution and say !

4 arose from the dead 9 or 4 awoke from the dead.’ So in the Gospels (Matt. xiv. 2) where the matter in hand is that Herod assumed the resurrection of John the Baptist, the words used are 4 is risen from the dead/ So also in Luke xvi. 31, it is said, in the parable about Lazarus, that if there were a resurrection, the man who returned from the dead would still not be believed, and the expression used is : 4 if one rise from the dead/ Where to the words 4 to rise/ £ to awaken/ the words 4 from the dead ’ are not added, the words 4 rise ’ and 4 awaken ’ never imply or could imply, 4 resurrection/ And, speaking of himself, Christ did not once, in all the passages quoted as proof of his prediction of his resurrection— not one single time did he employ the words, 4 from the dead/ Our conception of the resurrection is so different from the Jewish conception of life that it is impossible even to imagine how Christ could have spoken to the Jews about resurrection and an everlasting, personal life belonging to each man. The conception of a future personal life has come to us neither from Jewish teaching nor from Christ’s teaching. It entered church doctrine quite from without. Strange as it may appear, it cannot but be said that a belief in a future personal life is a very low and gross conception (based on a confusion of sleep with death) and one natural to all savage tribes ; and that the Hebrew doctrine, not to speak of the Christian doctrine, stood immeasurabfy above it. We are convinced that this super-