Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/141

 a national god, like the gods of the other contemporary nations. In confirmation of the first thought they point to the passages in Holy Scripture where God is given the name of Elohim (gods, from ‘Eloah,’ god) in the plural number, and where he is made to speak: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen. i. 1 and 26); we will make him an help meet for him (Gen. ii. 18), and elsewhere. But when that same Moses, in whose books these passages are to be found, so often and so much in detail preaches monotheism as the chief part of the Sinaitic legislation; when he calls all the pagan gods vanities and idols, and in every way tries to guard the Jews from following them (Lev. xvii. 7; Deut. xxxii. 21, and elsewhere), there can be no doubt but that he did not, contrary to his opinion, openly express any belief in polytheism, and so we cannot but agree with the holy fathers of the church that here God is indeed represented in the plural, but that not the idea of the plurality of gods is expressed here, but of the divine persons in one and the same God, that is, that there is here an indication of the mystery of the Holy Trinity.” (pp. 79 and 80.)

To any one reading the Old Testament it is clear that the conception of the God of the Old Testament is not at all the idea of a one God, but of a particular God, one only for the Jews. Why prove the contrary, when that is so unnecessary? What startles us here is not so much the intentional shutting of the eyes against what is manifest, but the unscrupulousness and incomprehensible boldness with which that is denied which is so evident to everybody who reads the Scripture, that which for hundreds of years has been worked out and made clear by all thinking men who busy themselves with these subjects.

It would be useless to quote passages from the Bible, from which it is clear that the Jews recognized their God as one only in comparison with other gods. The