Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/417

 get an extended controversy with the Catholics about penances and indulgences. Penances are correctionary punishments, and not punishments of revenge. All that is proved by Holy Scripture against the Catholics, who prove the opposite from the same Holy Scripture. In regard to the indulgences, the question stands as follows: Christ has redeemed the whole world with a profit,—a surplus is left; besides, the priests by their good lives have increased this surplus so that there is now a big pile of goodness. All these profits are at the service of the church. With these profits, which are hard to dispose of, the church, all the time guided by the Holy Ghost, pays God for the sins of its members, and the members pay to it not with something mysterious, but simply with cash. Now this doctrine is not so much objected to, as it is corrected. Our hierarchy agrees to the fact that the church has complete charge of this capital and with this capital pays for the sins of men, remitting the sins to these men in the sacrament of repentance; but the controversy is as to whether the church or its head may arbitrarily forgive these sins without the penitence of the sinner himself. The Catholics say that it can, our men say that it cannot. Of course, there is no sense in either assertion, just as there is no human sense in the question itself; but in this case, as in many other controversies with the Catholics and Protestants, our hierarchy, if it has any distinguishing feature at all, is characterized by stupidity and by an absolute inability to express itself in conformity with the laws of logic. Precisely the same happens in this controversy. The Catholics are logically more correct. If the church can remit sins by dint of its power, and the church is always holy, why should it not pardon robbers, as indeed all the churches do? After that follows the sacrament of unction with oil.

229. Connection with the preceding; conception of unction with oil, and its appellations. “The sacrament of