Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/287

 the fact that the chief disseminator of the teaching of Christ, Paul, never even so much as thought of the divinity of Christ, it is necessary to read those passages of his Epistles which directly determine the relations of Christ to God.

But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him (1 Cor. viii. 6). One God and Father of all, and in us all (Eph. iv. 6). That the God of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and so forth. (Eph. i. 17). The head of Christ is God (1 Cor. xi. 3). Simplest and most indubitable of all it is in 1 Tim. ii. 5: For there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

Indeed, there appears a man who teaches men of the relation which ought to exist between man and God, and preaches this teaching to all men. His relation and that of all men to God he expresses by the relation of the Son to the Father. That there might be no misunderstanding, he calls himself, and men in general, the son of man, and says that the son of man is the Son of God. In explaining man’s relation to God, he says that as the son ought to emulate the father, and have one aim and one will with him (in the parable of the shepherd), even so must man strive to be like God and to do the same that God is doing. And he says of himself that he is the son of God. Indeed, what else could Christ have said, since he taught them the sonhood to God? If he cannot help saying about himself that he is a son of God, since it is this precisely that he is teaching to all men, there cannot be said of him, what neither the Jews, nor he himself had the least idea about, that he was God and the second person of the Trinity; for, though he never denied his filial relation to God, he never ascribed any special importance to it. He was told: “If you are a simple man, like all, eating and drinking with the publicans, you have nothing to teach us about;