Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/20

 that information as something exceedingly interesting and quite probable.

I also remember how, when my eldest brother, Dmítri, who was a student at the university, suddenly with a passion which was characteristic of his nature abandoned himself to faith and began to attend all the services, to fast, and to lead a pure and moral life, all of us, even the grown persons, never stopped making him a butt of ridicule, and for some reason called him Noah. I remember how Músin-Púshkin, who at that time was the Curator of the Kazán University and who invited us to come to a dance at his house, tried in jest to persuade my brother, who declined to come, by telling him that even David had danced before the ark. At that time I sympathized with the jests of my elders and deduced the conclusion from it that the Catechism ought to be taught, that church ought to be attended, but that all that ought not to be taken too seriously. I also remember that I was very young when I read Vоltаiге, and that his ridicule not only did not provoke me, but even amused me very much.

My defection from faith took place in the same manner as it has taken place and still takes place in people of our cultivated class. In the majority of cases it happens like this, I think: people live as everybody else lives, and everybody else lives on the basis of principles that not only have nothing in common with the religious teaching, but generally run counter to it; the religious teaching does not enter into life, and in one’s relation with other people one never has occasion to come across it, and in one’s own life one never has occasion to refer to it; this religious teaching is professed somewhere there, far away from life and independently of it. If you come in contact with it, it is with its external phenomenon, which is not connected with life.

From a man’s life, from his acts, it is impossible now.