Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/112

 doctrine was an artificial code (composed from the mere external, most inexact terms) of the expressions of the beliefs of a great variety of men, discordant among themselves and mutually contradictory. I saw that harmonization was of no use to anybody, that nobody could ever believe all that doctrine, and never did, and that, therefore, there must be some external purpose in the impossible combination of these various doctrines into one and in promulgating them as truth. I even comprehended that purpose. I also understood why this doctrine was sure to produce atheists in the seminaries, where it is taught, and I understood the strange feeling which I experienced while reading those books. I had read the so-called blasphemous works of Voltaire and Hume, but never had I experienced such an undoubted conviction of the full faithlessness of a man as what I experienced in reference to the composers of the Catechisms and the Theologies. When you read in these works the quotations from the apostles and the so-called fathers of the church, of which the Theology is composed, you see that those are expressions of believing men, you hear the voice of their heart, in spite of the awkwardness, crudity, and at times falseness of their expressions; but when you read the words of the compiler, it becomes clear to you that the compiler did not care at all for the sincere meaning of the expression quoted by him,—he does not even try to comprehend it. All he needs is a casual word, in order to attach by means of it an idea of the apostle to an expression of Moses or of a new father of the church. All he wants is to form such a code as will make it appear that everything which is written in the so-called Holy Scriptures and in the fathers of the church was written only in order to prove the Symbol of Faith. And so I came at last to see that all that doctrine, the one in which, I then thought, the faith of the masses was expressed, was not only a lie, but also a deception, which