Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/265

 God, but asserts something about ourselves, men, about something which is best known to us, and asserts it obviously contrary to reality. It was possible to refute with proofs of common sense that God the Spirit has fourteen attributes, and so forth, for the attributes of God are not known to us, but there is no need to refute with proofs of common sense the argument that by the incarnation and death of Jesus Christ the human race was redeemed, that is, is freed from the propensity to commit sin, from the dimming of the intellect, from child labour, from physical and spiritual death, and from the unfruitfulness of the earth. In this case there is not even any need to show that none of the things asserted exist, for everybody knows that. All of us know full well that they do not exist, that men are evil, die, and do not know the truth, that women suffer in child labour, and that men earn their bread in the sweat of their brows. To prove the incorrectness of this teaching would be the same as proving that he is wrong who asserts that I have four legs. The assertion made by a man that I have four legs can only cause me to look for the cause which may have led a man to assert what is palpably wrong. The same is true of the dogma of the redemption. It is obvious to all that after the so-called redemption by Jesus Christ no change took place in the condition of man; what cause has, then, the church to assert the opposite? That is a question which involuntarily presents itself to one. The dogma is based on original sin. But the dogma itself about original sin, as we have seen, is a transference of the question about good and evil from a sphere which is accessible to the inward experience of each man to the sphere of mythology.

The most mysterious foundation of human life,—the internal struggle between good and evil, the consciousness of man’s freedom and dependence on God,—is, by the doctrine about the redemption, excluded from the con-