Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/472

 The prayers of the priests, especially such as will be said immediately after the eucharist, may alleviate their condition in hell.

But there will be an end of the world and a general judgment. The end of the world will be like this: one person of the Trinity, God Jesus, who sits in the flesh in heaven on the right side of his Father, will come down upon earth in a cloud, in the form of a man, such as he had when he was upon earth. Angels will blow trumpets, and all the dead will rise in their very bodies, but the bodies will be a little changed. Then all the angels, all the devils, and all men will assemble, and Christ will judge and will separate the righteous to the right: they will go to heaven with the angels; and the sinners he will put on the left: they will go with the devils to hell, and there they will be tormented with greater torments than burning. These torments will be everlasting. But all the righteous will eternally glorify the good God.

To my question as to what sense my life will have in this life, the answer will be as follows:

God, by his arbitrary will, created a strange world; a wild God, half-man, half-monster, created the world as he wanted it, and he kept saying that it was good, that everything was good, and that man was good. But it all turned out bad. Man fell under a curse, and his whole posterity was cursed, but God continued to make men in the wombs of their mothers, though he knew that all of them, or many, would perish. After he had invented a means for saving them, everything was as of old, and even worse, because while, as the church says, men like Abraham and Jacob could save themselves by their good lives, I am now certainly going to perish, if I was born a Jew, or a Buddhist, and accidentally do not come in contact with the sanctifying action of the church, and I shall be eternally tormented by the devils; more than that,—