Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/19



baptized and educated in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it from childhood and through the whole time of my boyhood and youth. But when I, at eighteen years of age, left the second year’s course of the university, I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught.

To judge from certain recollections, I had never believed in earnest; I had only had confidence in what I was taught and what the grown persons confessed in my presence; but this confidence was very brittle.

I remember when I was but eleven years old, a boy, now long dead, Volódinka M——, who attended the gymnasium, came to our house one Sunday and communicated to us as the latest bit of news a discovery which had been made at the gymnasium. This discovery was that there was no God, and that everything which we were taught was a mere fabrication (that was in the year 1838). I remember how my elder brothers were interested in that news and how they called me to a council, and all of us were very much excited about it and received