Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/102



doubting: I was completely convinced that in that knowledge of faith which I had accepted not everything was true. Formerly I should have said that the whole doctrine was wrong, but now I could not say So. The whole nation had the knowledge of the truth,—so much was certain,—or else it could not live. Besides, this knowledge of the truth was now accessible to me, and I had lived with it and had felt all its truth; but in this knowledge there was also a lie. Of that I could have no doubt. Everything which before that had repelled me now stood vividly up before me. Although I saw that in the masses there was less of that alloy of the lie which repelled me than in the representatives of the church,—I nevertheless saw that in the beliefs of the masses the lie was mixed in with the truth.

Whence had come the lie, and whence the truth? Both the lie and the truth are to be found in tradition, in the so-called Holy Tradition and Scripture. The lie and the truth have been transmitted by what is called the church. Willy-nilly I was led to the study, the investigation, of this Scripture and Tradition,—an investigation of which heretofore I had been so much afraid.

I turned to the study of that theology which at one time I had rejected with such contempt, as something useless. At that time it had appeared to me as a series of useless absurdities; at that time I was on all sides surrounded by phenomena of life which had seemed clear to me and filled with meaning; now I should have been