Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/366

 the imaginary hairs, should make it appear that the hairs which he has measured out have become tangled and he is trying to unravel them. Besides, this teaching about grace, the purpose of which is to pull the wool over the eyes of the believers because of the non-achievement of the promise of redemption, and to increase the income of the clergy, bears in itself that terrible germ of immorality which has morally corrupted the generations that confess this teaching. If a man is going to believe in the deception that he can be cured from diseases by the grace of the chrism, or that he will be immortal if he receives the grace, or in the concealment of the fact that the earth continues to be unfruitful,—all these deceptions have been comparatively harmless, but the deception about man’s being always sinful and impotent and about the uselessness of his striving after good, if he does not acquire grace,—this teaching cuts down to the root everything which is best in human nature. The immorality of this teaching could not help but startle all the best men who have lived amidst this confession, and so against this side of the doctrine—about the relation of man’s freedom to grace—have risen the more honest men in the church itself, and so this question has been complicated by endless controversies, which until the present divided the different creeds.

In Art. 184 there is an exposition of these controversies about grace:

“The dogma about grace which sanctifies sinful man has been subject to very many mutilations on the part of the heterodox and heretics. I. Some of these have erred and still err, in a greater or lesser degree, as regards the necessity of grace for man. To these belong the Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians, Socinians, and rationalists. The Pelagians, who appeared in the beginning of the fifth century in the Western church, taught as follows: ‘Since Adam by his fall in no way impaired his nature and consequently his