Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/363

 prehensible, and the more controversies, lies, malicious attacks, wars, and executions have taken place because of it, as we know from history. Indeed, what can be more remarkable, for uselessness, than this remarkable teaching about grace, about what, according to the definition of the Theology, is given by God to his creatures without the least desert on their part. One would think that according to this definition grace is the whole of life, everything, for everything is given to us by God without the least desert on our part, and that therefore the relation of man to grace is the relation of man to life. So it is, but since the Theology understands man’s relation to life in the most perverse manner, all the discussions about grace reduce themselves to the attempt to lower the meaning of life to a most monstrous and crude conception.

First it takes the account of the creation of man, in which Holy Scripture expresses in the person of Adam the relation of man’s freedom to grace, that is, to the external world. The whole account is taken by the Theology in the historical sense only. Adam fell, and the whole human race perished, and before Christ there was no relation of man’s freedom to grace, that is to life, there was no life, and men did not do wrong. Christ came and redeemed the whole human race, and then, speaking strictly, according to the teaching of the Theology, there was again destroyed the relation of man’s freedom to grace, to the external world, for according to the church teaching man became all holy and now does only what is good. But, as we know, nothing of the kind has ever happened, and the whole meaning of the Old Testament and Gospel teaching and of all moral and philosophical teachings consists only in finding a solution of the contradictions of good and evil, which are struggling in man. Although theology asserts that man after his redemption became entirely good, it knows that that is an untruth. It is not true that all men were bad before the redemption and