Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/355

 rules and regulations, and one from which statutes may issue. Whether I speak of the Catholic Church of such and such a year, or of the Roman, or Greek Orthodox Church, I am speaking of certain people,—the Pope, patriarchs, bishops,—who are organized in a certain manner and who in a certain way direct their flocks. The second is an abstract idea, and if I speak of the church in this sense, it is evident that attributes of time and place cannot be its definitions, and under no circumstance can there be definite decrees, expressed in definite words. The only definition of such a church, as the carrier of divine truth, is a correspondence with what is the divine truth.

The equating of these two conceptions to each other, and the substitution of one for the other, has always. formed a problem of all Christian confessions of faith. An assemblage of people, wishing to convince others that it possesses the absolute truth, asserts that it is holy and infallible. Its holiness and infallibility it builds on two foundations: on the manifestations of the Holy Ghost, which find their expression in the holiness of the members of that community and then in miracles, and on the legitimate succession of the teachership, which proceeds from Christ.

The first foundation does not stand criticism: holiness cannot be measured or proved; miracles are detected and proved deceptions, and so miracles cannot be adduced as proofs, so there is left but one proof, the correct succession of the hierarchy. That, too, cannot be proved, but equally it cannot be refuted, and so all the churches hold themselves on that foundation; on that argument alone do the churches at the present time hold themselves, and it is the only one on which they can hold themselves. If a Catholic, an Orthodox, an Old Ceremonialist, affirm that they have the truth, they can incontrovertibly base their assertions only on the infallibility of the succession of the keepers of the Tradition. The