Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/131

 his ways and purposes, and here, in the second part, it says: “Still, God has not left us in ignorance, but through the prophets, his Son, and the apostles has let us know about himself, in so far as we are able to comprehend him.” But we have just said that we cannot comprehend God, and here we suddenly assert that we know that he did not wish to leave us in ignorance, that we know the means which he has used for the purpose of attaining his end, that we know the real prophets and the real Son and the real apostles, whom he has sent to instruct us. It turns out that after we have recognized his incomprehensibility, we have suddenly discovered all the details of his purposes, his means. We judge of him as of a master who wants to inform his labourers of something. One or the other: either he is incomprehensible, and then we cannot know his purposes and actions, or he is entirely comprehensible, if we know his prophets and know that these prophets are not false, but real. And so it turns out:

“For this reason everything transmitted to us by the law, the prophets, the apostles, and the evangelists we accept, acknowledge, and respect, and we search after nothing else. Thus God, being omniscient and solicitous of the advantage of all men, has revealed everything which is useful for us to know, and has kept from us what we cannot grasp. Let us be satisfied with this and hold on to it, without removing the eternal landmarks or transgressing the divine Tradition (Prov. xxii. 28).” (p. 74.)

If so, we involuntarily ask ourselves: Why were these prophets and apostles true, and not those who are regarded as false? It turns out that God is incomprehensible and we are absolutely unable to know him, but that he has transmitted the knowledge of himself to men, not to all men, but to the prophets and the apostles, and this knowledge is kept in holy Tradition, and this alone we are to believe, because it alone, the church, is true, that is, those who believe in the Tradition, who observe the Tradition.