Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/1054

 new joys, which made him happy when he did not ponder on the meaning of life.

What did this mean? It meant that he was thinking badly, and living well. Without knowing it, he had been sustained by those spiritual verities which he had sucked in with his mother's milk, and he indulged in thought, not only now not recognizing those truths, but even strenuously avoiding them. Now it was clear to him that he could live only through the blessed influence of the faith in which he had been taught.

"What should I have been, how should I have lived, if I had not absorbed these beliefs.... if I had not known that I must live for God, and not for the satisfaction of my desires? I should have been a thief, a liar, a murderer. Nothing of what seems the chief joy of my life would have had any existence for me."

And, though he made the most strenuous efforts of his imagination, he could not picture to himself what kind of a wild creature he might have been, if he had not really known the aim of his existence.

"I was in search of an answer to my question; thought could not give it, for the problem was too lofty. Life itself, with the innate knowledge of good and evil, alone could give me an answer. And this knowledge I did not acquire. It was given to me, like all the rest; given, I could not know where to get it. Did I get it from reason? But would reason ever have proved to me that I ought to love my neighbor, instead of choking him? I was taught it in my childhood; but I believed it gladly, because it was already existent in my soul. Reason discovered the struggle for existence,—that law which demands the overthrow of every obstacle in the way of our desires. That is the result of reason; but reason has nothing to do with loving our neighbor."

remembered a recent scene between Dolly and her children. The children had been left alone, and had amused themselves by making raspberry jam over a can