Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/242

 about the most fundamental questions of humanity, about God, about the beginning of the world, about man, by the side of perfectly useless, perfectly senseless propositions, such as the dogma about the angels and the devils, and so forth, and so we will omit what is useless and will necessarily dwell on the important ones.

The dogma about the original sin, that is, about the beginning of evil, touches a fundamental question, and so we must attentively analyze what the church has to say about it. According to the teaching of the church, the struggle which man feels in himself between the evil and the good, and the proclivity to do evil, which the church asserts as an adjudged case, are explained by the fall of Adam and, we must add, by the fall of the devil, for the devil was the inciter of the crime and, having been created good, must have fallen before. But, in order that Adam’s fall may explain our proclivity to do evil, it is necessary to explain the fall of Adam and of the devil who tempted him. If in the story of the fall of the devil and of Adam there should be any explanation of that fundamental contradiction between the consciousness of good and the propensity to do wrong, as the church says, then the recognition of the fact that this contradiction, which I am conscious of, is an inheritance from Adam, would be an explanation for me; but here I am told that Adam had just such freedom as I feel in myself and that, having this freedom, he fell, and so I have the same freedom. What, then, does the story of Adam explain to me?

We are all ourselves occupied with that struggle, and we feel and know by internal experience what, as we are told, took place with the devil and later with Adam. Precisely the same takes place in us each day and each minute that must have taken place in the soul of the devil and in that of Adam. If in the story of the freedom of the devil and of Adam, of how they, the creatures