Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/136

 having any faith, given myself an explanation of life, just as every unbeliever has such an explanation? No matter how poor such an explanation may be, every explanation is at least an explanation. But this is not an explanation it is merely a connection of words without any meaning and giving no idea of anything. I tried to find the meaning of life through rational knowledge, and found that life had no meaning. Then it seemed to me that faith gave that meaning and so I turned to the keeper of faith, to the church. And here, with its very first statement, the church affirms that there is no sense in the very concept of God. But, maybe, it only seems to me that it is senseless, because I do not understand the whole significance of it. Certainly that is not the invention of one person; it is that which billions have believed in. One and trine: what does that mean? I read farther:

“Chapter I. Of God, one in substance.” (p. 74.) It is necessary, in the first place, to show that God is one in substance, and, in the second place, to disclose the idea. of the very substance of God. Then there follows the doctrine about the unity of God in fourteen pages, divided. into articles. (“The Doctrine of the Church, and a Short History of the Dogma about the Unity of God.”)

There are proofs of the unity of God from Holy Scripture and from reason. The moral application of the dogma. An exposition of the proofs and explanations of the unity of God.

God is for me and for every believer, above all, the beginning of all beginnings, the cause of all causes, a being out of time and space, the extreme limit of reason. No matter how I may express this idea, I cannot say that God is one, for to that concept I cannot apply the conception of number, which results from time and space, and so I can say just as little that there are seventeen Gods, as that there is one. God is the beginning of everything, God is God. That is the way I formerly