Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/237



91. descent of the sin of the first parents to the whole human race: prefatory remarks. Adam’s fall was the cause of the original sin. The exposition of the original sin is preceded by two different opinions. Some, the rationalists, regard original sin as nonsense and assume that diseases, sorrows, and death are the properties of human nature, and that man is born innocent. “Others, the Reformers, fall into the opposite extreme by exaggerating too much the consequences of the original sin in us: according to this teaching, the sin of our first parents entirely abolished freedom in man, and his divine image, and all his spiritual powers, so that the nature of man became tainted by sin: everything which he may wish, everything which he may do, is a sin; his very virtues are sins, and he is positively unfit for any good. The first false teaching indicated above, the Orthodox Church rejects by its doctrine of the actuality in us of the original sin with all its consequences (that is, original sin taken in its broad sense); the latter it rejects by its doctrine about these consequences.”

As always, there is an exposition in the form of a heretical teaching which cannot be understood otherwise by any man in his senses. The fact that all men are by their natures subject to diseases and death, and that babes are innocent, is represented in the form of a heresy, and an extreme heresy at that. Another extreme is the teaching of the Reformers. The church teaches the middle way, and this middle way is supposed to be this, that by 217