Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/322

 The whole business is to believe in this new God and that he has saved us: it is necessary to believe and pray. That is contrary to the teaching itself, but there are teachers who undertake to reconcile and elucidate and they reconcile and elucidate. It turns out that he is God-man, that he is the second person of the Trinity, that sin and a curse were upon us, and he has redeemed us. And the whole teaching is reduced to the faith in this redemption, and the whole teaching is left out and gives place to faith. It is necessary to believe in Christ the God and in redemption, and in that alone lies the salvation.

Of the teaching of Christ, since it cannot be rejected, there is the merest mention. It says that, among other things, Christ taught self-renunciation and love, and that it does not hurt and is even good to follow him. Why follow? Nothing is said about that, since, in reality, it is not needed for salvation, and salvation is obtained anyway by the sacerdotal and royal ministration of Christ, that is, by the very fact of the redemption. Here we have again the same as in the case of the original sin and the deification of Christ. The doctrine about the redemption is obviously crude; a true idea, verbally comprehended, is reduced to a teaching, and a prohibition is imposed on any other interpretation than the one accepted by the church. With a certain effort, as I recall my childish years and some feeble-minded persons, I can imagine how such a narrow conception of the meaning of Christ may be alone accessible. But why not permit me to think, as I do, that Christ has saved us by having discovered the law which gives salvation to those who follow it, and that he has redeemed us by having sealed the truth of his teaching by his death on the cross? My conception includes that of the church, and not only does not destroy anything, but puts forward as the first important work effort, that effort by which, according to the