Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/261

 man,—the whole teaching of the Second Part is no longer a teaching about faith, but pure myth. For this reason the teaching of this Second Part has a special character. In this Second Part stand out sharply those incipient departures from common sense which were made in the exposition of the dogmas of the First Part, about God, about man, about evil. Apparently the teaching of the First Part is based on the faith in the Second Part, and the second does not result from the first, as the Theology is trying to make out; on the contrary, the faith in the mythology of the Second Part serves as the basis of all the departures from common sense, which we find in the First Part. Here is that teaching:

“124. The necessity of divine assistance for the rehabilitation of man with the possibility for it on the part of man. (1) Man has committed three great wrongs, by not observing the original command of God: (a) with his sin he has offended infinitely his infinitely good, but also infinitely great, infinitely just Creator, and thus has been subjected to an eternal curse (Gen. iii. 17-19); (cf. Gen. xxvii. 26); (b) he has infected with sin all his being, which was created good: has dimmed his intellect, has perverted his will, has mutilated in himself the image of God; (c) has by his sin produced disastrous results in his own nature and in external Nature. Consequently, in order to save man from all these evils, in order to unite him with God and make him once more blessed, it was necessary: (a) for the sinner to satisfy the infinite justice of God, which was offended by man’s fall,—not because he wanted vengeance, but because no attribute of God can be deprived of its proper action: without the execution of this condition man would for ever remain before the justice of God as the child of wrath (Eph. ii. 3), as the child of curse (Gal. iii. 10), and the reconciliation and union of God with man could not even begin; (b) to destroy sin in the whole being of man, to enlighten his reason, correct his