Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/437

 that, in spite of the whole desire to be baptized, anointed, communed, man may not have the chance to be so. Consequently retribution appears as unjust, when grace is taken into consideration. Adam could be punished for the apple; he could have eaten, or not eaten it; but a punishment because a man had no chance or possibility to be baptized or to commune, such a punishment destroys the idea of God’s justice, and that is precisely what results from church grace. According to the Old Testament, God is represented as crude and cruel, but none the less just; according to the new grace, as the hierarchy teaches it, he is represented as an unjust judge, as one gone mad, who punishes men for what is beyond their will.

Evidently one cannot get away from the laws of reason. The first error, or lie, of the redemption led up to the greater lie of grace, and grace led to a still greater lie, to the faith of obedience, and this again to the mechanical actions of the sacraments. The necessity of an incitement for the performance of the sacraments led up to retribution, and that teaching has found its expression in a horrifying monstrosity.

God, to save all men, gave his Son up to execution, and from this it follows that if a pope is too late with his sacrament when I am dying, I shall go, if not directly to hell, somewhere where I shall be much worse off than he who has stolen a lot of money and has hired a pope or several popes to be always about him. That is not a misuse, but a direct conclusion. But that does not embarrass the Theology. It says: “The first thing is that God has saved us; the second thing is that he has given us sacraments; the third thing the Lord God achieves after the performance of the second, which he achieves with our help: he then appears as the judge of men, who justly weighs our deserts, whether we have made proper use, or not, of the means of purification from sins and of sanctifi-