Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/144

 “(1) All nations have preserved an idea of the one God.” That is not true. The author himself has just overthrown the polytheists.

“(2) On the agreement of the pagan authors.” This again is not true. It cannot be a proof, because it does not refer to all pagan writers.

“(3) On the innateness of the idea about one God.”

This is again not true, because Tertullian’s words, which are quoted in confirmation of this position, are said about the innateness of the idea about God, but not about the innateness of the idea about the unity of God.

“Listen,” Tertullian says to the pagans, “to the testimony of your soul, which, in spite of the prison of the body, of prejudices, and bad bringing up, of the fury of the passions, of the enslavement to false gods, when it is roused as though from intoxication or from a deep profound sleep, when it feels, so to speak, a spark of health, involuntarily invokes the name of the one true God and cries: ‘Great God! Good God! Whatever God may give!’ Thus his name is to be found on the lips of all men. The soul also recognizes him as the Judge in the following words: ‘God sees, I hope to God, God will recompense me.’ And pronouncing these words, it turns its glances, not to the Capitol, but to heaven, knowing that there is the palace of the living God, that from there and from him it has its origin. On the testimony of the soul according to the Christian nature (naturaliter Christiana).” (p. 84.)

This exhausts the anthropological proofs. Here are the cosmological proofs:

“(1) The universe is one, consequently God is one.” But why there is one universe is not apparent.

“(2) In the life of the world there is order. If there existed several rulers of the universe, many gods, naturally divers among themselves, there could not be such an orderly flow and agreement in Nature; on the contrary,