Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/476



Orthodox Church!

With this word I no longer can connect any other conception than that of a few hirsute men, extremely self-confident, deluded, and ignorant, in silk and velvet, with diamond panagias, called bishops and metropolitans, and thousands of other hirsute men, who are in a state of the grossest, most servile servility to those dozens of men, who, under the guise of performing certain sacraments, are busy cheating and fleecing the people.

How can I believe in this church, which to man’s profoundest questions about his soul answers with petty deceptions and insipidities, and affirms that no one must dare to answer these questions in any other way, and that in everything which is most precious in my life I should not be guided by anything but what it points out to me? I may choose the colour of my pantaloons, I may choose my wife according to my liking, but in everything else—precisely that in which I feel myself to be a man—I must be guided by them, those idle, cheating, and ignorant people.

In my life, in the holiness of my soul, I have for a guide and pastor the parish priest, a dull, illiterate lad who has been let out of the seminary, or a hard-drinking old man whose only care it is to take in as many eggs