Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/450

 he never established marriage. But people who do not understand the peculiarities of Christ's teaching, who are accustomed to external tenets, and who wish to feel themselves in the right, as does the Pharisee, contrary to the whole spirit of Christ's teaching,—have out of the letter made an external teaching of rules, and have substituted this teaching for Christ's true teaching of the ideal.

The church teachings, which call themselves Christian, have in all manifestations of life substituted for Christ's teaching and ideal the external injunctions and rules which are contrary to the spirit of the teaching. This has been done in reference to government, courts, armies, churches, divine service; this has also been done in reference to marriage. Disregarding the fact that Christ nowhere established marriage,—on the contrary, whenever he mentioned an external rule it was to oppose it ("Forsake thy wife and follow me"),—the church teachings, which call themselves Christian, have established marriage as a Christian institution, that is, they have established external observances which make sexual love sinless and entirely lawful for a Christian.

Since in the true Christian teaching there are no foundations for the institution of marriage, the result has been that people of our world have departed from one shore without landing on the other, that is, they do not believe, in reality, in the church definitions of marriage, feeling that this institution has no foundation in the Christian teaching, and at the same time not seeing before them Christ's ideal, which is concealed by the church doctrine,—the striving after complete chastity, they are left without any guidance in relation to marriage. From this comes the seemingly strange phenomenon that with the Jews, Mohammedans, Lamaists, and others, who profess religious teachings of a much lower order than the Christian, but who possess precise external injunctions in regard to marriage, the family principle and conjugal fidelity are