Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/364

 became all good after that, and so the Theology sees that the question, as it stood before Adam,—whether to eat or not to eat the apple, and as it stands before us,—whether to live or not to live according to the teaching of Christ, is still standing before men, and so it was compelled to invent a doctrine by which the question of what man must do should be supplanted by the question of what he ought to confess and speak. And for that purpose is invented the teaching, at first, of the church, and now, of grace.

But, as we shall later see, this teaching about grace is insufficient, and there is invented another, a new teaching about faith, which is to cooperate in the obfuscation before people of the chief religious and moral question as to how men ought to live. It is impossible connectedly to render this teaching about grace in the manner in which it is expounded. The more you penetrate into it, the less you comprehend it. You read and fail to understand, not only what is being expounded, but even why it is all expounded. Only after reading the whole Theology through, after reading the chapter on the sacraments and on the mysteries, and recalling the contradiction with reality, which is put in the dogma of the redemption, is it possible, at last, to divine the cause which made them invent those strange aberrations, and to explain to ourselves that remarkable doctrine.

The explanation of the doctrine about grace I find to be as follows: the hierarchy (for exactness’ sake I will from now on use this word instead of the obscure “church”) teaches us that Christ redeemed the human race, destroyed sin, evil, death, diseases, and the unfruitfulness of the earth. In reality nothing of the kind has been destroyed; everything was left as of old. How, then, justify the unjustified assertion? In order to justify it, it is necessary to attach to the salvation of the human race by Christ another condition, without which this salvation cannot take place, so as