Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/192

 tion are ended, and there will be nothing else. And this through the mouth of his church says God the Father to me, his son, who with all my power am looking for truth and salvation! To my entreaty and tears of despair he replies to me: “The indivisible is divided, what is one is trebled: that is the Father, the Son, and the living Spirit, preserving all.” And to the demands of my reason, which has been given me for the comprehension of God, there is no other answer. I cannot say, nor can any one else say, that I have comprehended it, and so I cannot say that I believe. With my tongue I can say that I believe that “what is one is trebled. Oh, most glorious transformation!” But when I say that, I am a liar and an atheist, and it is precisely this that the church demands of me, that is, those people who assert that they believe in it. But that is not true: they do not believe and nobody has ever believed it. What a marvellous phenomenon! Christianity will soon have existed for a thousand years in Russia. For a thousand years the pastors have been teaching their flocks the foundations of the faith. The foundation of the faith is the dogma of the Trinity. Ask a peasant, a country woman, what the Trinity is. Out of ten hardly one will answer you. It cannot be said that that is due to ignorance. Ask them what the teaching of Christ consists in. Everybody will tell you. And yet the dogma of the Trinity is not complicated or long. Why, then, does no one know it? Because it is impossible to know what makes no sense.

Then there follow proofs that these truths, that is, that God is a Trinity, have been revealed by God to all men. The proofs are divided into proofs from the Old and the New Testament. In the Old Testament, which forms the teaching of the Jews, of those Jews who regard the Trinity as the greatest blasphemy, in this Old Testament do they look for proofs that God has revealed his three-fold nature to men. Here are these proofs from the Old