Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/358

 state. The church is always the head of everything. Among the Protestants there appears, in spite of the apparently high significance which they ascribe to the church, the question about the relations of church and state. They are all busy now separating or freeing the church from the oppression of the state, and all of them complain of the wretched condition of divine truth and of Christ at its head, who is in captivity under Bismarck, Gambetta, and so forth, but they forget that if the state can exert any influence on the church, it is evident that, in speaking of the church, we are speaking not of the divine truth which has Christ at its head, but of a human institution.

Men who believe in the teaching of the church cannot base their faith on anything but the legality, the regularity of the succession of the hierarchy. But the regularity and legality of the succession of the hierarchy cannot be proved in any way. No historical investigations can confirm it. On the contrary, historical investigations not only fail to confirm the regularity of any hierarchy, but show directly that Christ did not establish an infallible hierarchy, that in the first times it did not exist, that that system arose in the time of the decline of the Christian teaching, during the time of hatred and malice on account of some interpretation of dogmas, and that all the most varied Christian teachings have asserted just as positively their rights in the regularity of the succession in their church, and have denied that regularity in others, so that the whole doctrine of the Theology, which in regard to the church is not verified in any respect, comes down for me to the desire of certain persons to advance, in opposition to other teachings (which have just such pretensions and which with just as much right assert that they are in the right), their own teaching as the only one which is true and holy.

So far I have not seen in this teaching anything true