Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/288

 but if you are a Son of God, a Messiah, show us your power, or be executed.” He denied both. He said: “I am not a simple man,—I am fulfilling the will of God my Father, and teaching men about it; but I am also not a special son of God, but only one who is doing his Father’s will, and this I teach to all men.”

It is with this that he struggled all his life, and this they now ascribe to him, and try to prove that he said what he actually denied and what, if he had said it, would have destroyed the whole meaning of his teaching. According to the teaching of the church it turns out that God descended to earth only in order to save men. Their salvation consists in believing that he is God. It would not have been much trouble for him to say outright, “I am God,” or, if not outright, at least not by such circumlocution that there is a possibility of understanding him quite differently without any desire to do wrong. Let it even be by circumlocution, if only it would be possible to explain his words as meaning that he was God. Well, even if his words were not exact, at least they should not contradict the statement that he was God. But, as it is, he has spoken in such a way that it is not possible to understand him otherwise than that he asserted to many that he was not God. If he had only revealed this secret to his nearest disciples so that they might have imparted it to other men, but, as it is, the disciples taught only that he was a righteous man, a mediator between man and God, and not a God.

Suddenly it turns out that for our salvation, which comes from him, his words have to be comprehended not as he and his disciples have spoken them, and that we must not rely on our common sense, but must believe the church, which, basing itself on tricks and misinterpretations of certain verses, asserts the opposite of what he has said about himself, and what his disciples have said of him. I have not dwelt on this passage in order to prove