Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/93



was so necessary for me at that time to believe in order to exist that I unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and obscurities of the doctrine. But there was a limit to these attempts to elucidate the rites. If the responsory became clearer and clearer to me in its main words; if I managed to explain to myself in some way the words, “And having mentioned our Lady the Most Holy Mother of God and all the saints, we shall give ourselves, and one another, and our lives to Christ the God;” if I explained the frequent repetitions of the prayers for the Tsar and his relatives by assuming that they were more than others subject to temptation and so needed more praying for,—the prayers about vanquishing the enemy and foe, even though I explained them on the ground that an enemy was an evil,—these prayers and many others, like the Cherubical prayers and the whole sacrament of the offertory or “To the chosen leader,” and so forth, almost two-thirds of the service, either had no explanation at all, or I felt that, finding explanations for them, I was lying and thus entirely destroyed my relation to God, and was losing every possibility of faith.

The same I experienced in celebrating the chief holidays. To remember the Sabbath, that is, devote one day to communion with God, was comprehensible to me. But this chief holiday was a celebration of the event of the resurrection, the reality of which I could not imagine or comprehend. And by this name of resurrection the