Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/309

 that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. xv. 3). “For” means in consequence of our sins. “Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour” (Eph. v. 2). Christ’s love for us brought him to a shameful death. That, too, is considered a confirmation of the dogma. “Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (Rom. iv. 25). The resurrection is mentioned as a miracle, and it says that he was delivered on account of our sins. “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past” (Rom. iii. 25). Again a misty, tangled sentence, like all of Paul’s expressions, which denote one and the same thing, namely, that the death of a just man has freed men from their previous errors. And all that is regarded as a proof. But the chief proof is found in the interpretations of the fathers of the church, that is, of those men who have invented the dogma of the redemption.

“(a) St. Barnabas: ‘We will believe that the Son of God could not have suffered except for us—for our sins he wished to bring as a sacrifice the vessel of the spirit.’ (b) St. Clement of Rome: ‘We shall look up to our Lord Jesus Christ, whose blood was given for us—we shall look up attentively to the blood, and shall consider how precious his blood is before God, since, having been spilled for our salvation, it obtained the grace of repentance for the whole world.’ (c) Ignatius Theophorus: ‘Christ died for you, in order that you, believing in his death, might be saved from death.’ (d) St. Policarp: ‘He suffered death itself for our sins—; he suffered everything for us, that we might live in him.’” (p. 142.)

Or another place, as a sample of that arbitrariness and blasphemous pettiness, with which the whole book is permeated.