Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/481

 tation and not to have to struggle. It is necessary to mutilate the heart and then the external mutilation will not be necessary, for external mutilation does not save one from temptation. People fall into this deception because it is altogether impossible to destroy in the heart the lust of fornication and nothing more, it is necessary to destroy all lust, it is necessary to love God in such a way as to despise all the temptation of the world, and that is a long path; but here it is as though one could by a short way free oneself from the most obvious and disgraceful sin, and the trouble is that by this short cut one frequently arrives nowhere except at a swamp.

The sexual instinct is a striving, if not after fulfilling the whole law, at least after securing the possibility of its fulfilment to one's posterity. The truth of this is confirmed in separate individuals: the more a man approaches the fulfilment of the law, the more he turns away from sexual lust, and vice versa.

Just as man, together with other animals, submits to the law of the struggle for existence, so he submits, like the animals, to the law of sexual propagation; but man, as a man, finds in himself another law, which is contrary to the struggle, the law of love, and the law of chastity, which is contrary to sexual intercourse for the sake of propagation.

According to the church belief there is to be an end of the world; according to science man's life on earth, and earth itself, are to come to the same end; what, then, is it which so provokes people that the good and moral life will also lead to the end of the human race? Maybe these things coincide. In the statutes of the Shakers it says: "Why should men through continence not free themselves from violent death?" Beautiful.