Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/140

 ple, we speak, of the one sun, the word ‘one’ is used in such a sense that no second or third can be added to it. So much the more God, when he is called one, is to be understood not as one in number, but in his totality, one in the sense that there is no other God.” (p. 77.)

However touching these words of the father of the church are by their dim striving to raise his conception to a higher level, it is evident that both that father of the church and the author are struggling only with polytheism and want the only God, but fail to understand that the words “one, only” are words expressing number and so cannot be applied to God, in whom we believe. His saying that God is “one or only not in number” is tantamount to saying: “The leaf is green or greenish not in colour.” It is evident that here the idea of God as one sun by no means excludes the possibility of another sun. Thus this whole passage brings us only to the conclusion that for him. who wants to follow the consequent discussions it is necessary to renounce the idea of God as the beginning of everything, and to lower this idea to the semi-pagan concept of a one and only God as he is conceived in the books of the Old Testament. In the chapter of the proofs from the Old Testament, texts are quoted which reduce the conception of God to the one, exclusive God of the Jews, and there is an exposition of a dispute this time no longer with the heretics, but with modern science. The opinion of modern science that the God of the Jews was conceived by them differently from what God is conceived now by believers and that they did not even know the one God, is called a bold, manifest calumny.

“After that it is a bold, manifest calumny to assert that in the Old Testament there are traces of the teaching of polytheism and that the God of the Jews, according to their Sacred Books, was only one of the gods,