Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/305

 “151. Especially the death of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice of redemption for our sake.” (p. 139.)

His death is the chief sacrifice of redemption for our sake. God sacrifices to God and redeems an obligation from the good God. All these are internal contradictions. There is a contradiction in every sentence, and these sentences are contradictorily combined with each other. I repeat what I said about the dogma of the Trinity. It is not exactly that I do not believe,—I do not know what there is to believe. I can believe or not believe that to-morrow a city will appear in heaven or that the grass will grow as high as the sun, but I cannot believe that to-morrow will be to-day, or that three will be one and yet three, or that pain does not pain, or that one God was divided into two and yet is one, or that the good God punishes himself and redeems from himself his own error of creation. I simply see that the one who is talking does not know how to talk or has nothing to say.

There is no rational connection. The only external connection is the references to Scripture. They give at least some kind of an explanation, not of what is being talked about, but why such terrible absurdities may be uttered. As in many preceding places, the quotations from Scripture show that the assertion of these absurdities does not take place voluntarily, but results, as in the history of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from a false, for the most part, crude, comprehension of the words of Scripture.

Here, for example, in confirmation of the fact that the death of Christ the God has redeemed the human race, there are quoted the passages from the Gospel. From the discourse with Nicodemus: Even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life (John iii. 14, 15).

It says “The Son of man must be lifted up.” How can that mean the redemption of the human race by