Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/109



inevitably led to the investigation of the doctrine of the faith of the Orthodox Church. In the communion with the Orthodox Church I had found salvation from despair. I was firmly convinced that in this doctrine lay the only truth, but many, very many, manifestations of this doctrine, which were contrary to those fundamental concepts which I had about God and his law, compelled me to turn to the study of the doctrine itself.

I did not then assume that the doctrine was false,—I was afraid of supposing that,—for one untruth in that doctrine destroyed the whole doctrine, and then I should lose the main support which I had found in the church as the carrier of truth, as the source of that knowledge of the meaning of life which I was trying to find in faith. So I began to study the books which expounded the Orthodox doctrine. In all those works the doctrine, in spite of the diversity of details and some difference in consecutiveness, is one and the same; so, too, the connection between the parts and the fundamental principle is one and the same.

I read and studied those books, and here is the feeling