Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/98

 cism and to the so-called dissenters. During that time I, on account of my interest in religion, came in contact with believers of different creeds, with Catholics, Protestants, Old Ceremonialists, Milkers, and so forth, and among them I found a large number of morally elevated men and sincere believers. I wanted to be a brother to these people. What happened? The tenet which promised to me that it would unite all in one faith and love, the same tenet, in the person of its of its best representatives, told me that all these people were living in the lie, that what gave them the strength of life was the temptation of the devil, and that we alone were in possession of the only possible truth. I saw that the Orthodox people regarded all those who did not profess the same faith with them as heretics, precisely as the Catholics regarded Orthodoxy as a heresy; I saw that toward all who did not profess faith with external symbols and words, as Orthodoxy did, Orthodoxy, though trying to conceal it, assumed a hostile attitude, which could not be otherwise, for, in the first place, the assertion that you are living in a lie, while I have the truth, is the most cruel of words which one man can say to another, and, in the second place, because a man who loves his children and brothers cannot help assuming a hostile attitude toward people who wish to convert his children and brothers to a false faith. This hostility increases in proportion as the knowledge of the doctrine increases. And I, who had assumed the truth to be in the union of love, was involuntarily startled to find that that religious teaching destroyed precisely that which it ought to build up.

The offence is so manifest to us educated people, who have lived in countries where several religions are professed, and who have seen that contemptuous, self-confident, imperturbable negative attitude which a Catholic assumes toward an Orthodox or a Protestant and an Orthodox toward a Catholic or a Protestant, and a Protestant to-