Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/202

 church. It is necessary also in order to defend the church itself against the unjust rebuke of the freethinkers that the church began to offer the doctrine about the three hypostases in God only with the fourth century, or with the First Ecumenical Council, but that before that time it was entirely unknown to the church, or was presented in an entirely different form. Consequently it is sufficient to take the thread of the tradition to the fourth century, or to the First Ecumenical Council, and to show whether and how the ancient Christian church taught about the Holy Trinity in the first three centuries.”

So we have learned from the Theology, that there are absolutely no proofs in Scripture in confirmation of the Trinity, except the polemics of the composer of the Theology; we have also learned that it is not even possible to assert that the church has always adhered to this tradition and that the only foundation of this assertion is left in the polemical art of the composer of the Theology. I have read all the proofs of Art. 28, which show in fifteen pages that the church has always professed the Trinity, but these arguments have not convinced me, not because I have read more exact and convincing proofs against it, but because my feeling revolts and I cannot believe that God, who has revealed himself to me in such a senseless, wild expression as that “I am one and three, and I am the Father and the Son, and I am the Spirit,” should not have given me in his Scripture, or in his Tradition, or in my soul, any means to understand what it signifies, but has condemned me, for the solution of the question about God and my salvation, to have recourse to no other means than believing the argument of the Orthodox Theology against the rationalists, and repeating, without comprehension of what I am saying, the words which the Orthodox Theology will dictate to me.

I was on the point of making my last conclusion about