Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/243

 of the Good, created for bliss and glory, fell, there were given the slightest explanation of how they could have become evil, since they had been created good, I should understand that my propensity to do evil is the consequence of their special relation to good and evil; but I am told that in them took place precisely what is taking place in me, with the only difference that in them all that happened with less reason than in me: I have a mass of temptations which did not exist for them, and I am deprived of those special cooperations of God which they enjoyed. Thus the story about them not only explains nothing, but even obscures the whole matter; if it comes to analyzing this question of freedom and to explaining it, would it not have been better to analyze it and explain it in myself, rather than in some fantastic beings, like the devil and Adam, whom I am not even able to imagine? After some quasi-refutals of those who are supposed to say that evil is due to the limitation of Nature, to the flesh, to bad education, the author says:

“The most satisfactory solution of all these questions, as far as reason is concerned, the correctest explanation of the evil which exists in the human race, is offered by the divine revelation, when it says that the first man was actually created good and innocent, but that he sinned before God and thus injured his whole nature, and that thereupon all men, who come from him, are naturally born with the original sin, with an impaired nature, and with a propensity to do evil.”

There are many errors and many consequences of these errors in this reflection. The first error is this, that if the first man, who was in such unusually favourable conditions for innocence, impaired his nature and did so only because he was free, there is no need for explaining why I impair my own nature. There cannot even be such a question. Whether I am his descendant or not, I am