Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/244

 just such a man and have just such freedom, and just such, or even greater, temptations. What is there here to explain? To say that my proclivity to do evil is due to the inheritance from Adam, means only to roll the guilt from an ailing head on one that is sound, and to judge by traditions, which, to say the least, are queer, about what I already know through inward experience. Another error it is to assert that the propensity to sin is due to Adam, for that means to transfer the question from the sphere of faith to that of reasoning. A strange quid pro quo takes place here. The church, which reveals to us the truths of religion, recedes from the foundation of faith, that recognition of a mysterious, incomprehensible struggle which takes place in the soul of each man, and, instead of giving by the revelation of the divine truths the means for the successful struggle of the good against the evil in the soul of each man, the church takes up a stand on the field of reasoning and of history. It abandons the sphere of religion and tells the story about Paradise, Adam, and the apple, and firmly and stubbornly sticks to the barren Tradition, which does not even explain anything or give anything to those who seek the knowledge of faith. The only result of this transference of the question from the chief foundation of any religion,—from the tendency to know good and evil, which lies in the soul of each man,—to the fantastic sphere of history is above all to deprive the whole religion of that only foundation on which it can stand firmly. The questions of faith have always been and always will be as to what my life is with that eternal struggle between good and evil, which each man experiences. How am I to wage that war? How shall I live? But the teaching of the church, in place of the question as to how I should live, presents the question as to why I am bad, and replies to this question by saying that I am bad because I became so through Adam’s sin, that I am all in sin, that I am