Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/413

 and even very often (1 John i. 8, 10), and be subject to diseases, sometimes very serious ones, which bring him to the grave,—it has pleased the all-good God to establish in his church two other sacraments, as two saving remedies for his ailing members: the sacrament of repentance, which remedies our spiritual ailments, and the sacrament of unction with oil, which extends its saving action over the bodily ailments.”

But why only over the ailments? Did we not hear before that the redemption freed men from diseases and death, and that this redemption becomes operative through the sacrament of unction with oil? Consequently unction with oil destroys diseases and death. But laws are not written for the Theology. Unction with oil, as will be seen later, operates against diseases and death, but only a tiny little bit.

“Repentance, taken in the sense of a sacrament, is a sacramental action in which the pastor of the church, by strength of the Holy Ghost, absolves the repentant Christian from all sins committed by him after his baptism, so that the Christian again becomes innocent and sanctified, such as he came out of the waters of baptism.” (pp. 425 and 426.)

From the standpoint of the church, what is important in this sacrament is not the humility with which the repentant man approaches it, not that verification of himself, but only that purification from sin which the hierarchy dispenses by force of an imaginary power. I even wonder why the church does not entirely abelish this sacrament, substituting for it that remissory prayer, which it has introduced and which is said over the dead: “I, unworthy man, by force of the power given to me, remit your sins.” The church sees only this external imaginary purification and cares only for it, that is, it sees only the external action to which it ascribes a curative significance. What is taking place in the soul of the repentant sinner