Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/508

 out, by means of rules and prescriptions, and each person solves it according to his powers. The ideal, of course, always remains one and the same, and is expressed in the Gospel: Leave your wife, and follow me. But to what extent a man may do so, that only he and God know.

You ask what is meant by the words, Leave your wife. Does it mean to go away from her or to stop sleeping with her and begetting children? Of course, "to leave" means to do this, that your wife should not be as a wife, but as any other woman, as a sister. In this does the ideal lie. And this ought to be done in such a way as not to irritate the wife, not to offend her, not to subject her to anger and to temptation. And that is terribly hard to do. A married man who strives after the Christian life feels within his heart the whole difficulty of healing the wound which he himself has inflicted. This one thing I think and say and that is, being married, one should strain all one's life and all one's forces to become unmarried without increasing the sin.

Yes, Christ's ideal of serving the Father is a service which first of all excludes the care both of life and of the continuation of the species. So far an attempt at renouncing these cares has not put a stop to the human race. What will happen in the future, I do not know.

I do not like to speak of the peculiarity of our time, but, in the relations of husbands and wives, of men and women, amidst the rich and the poor, there is in every country something peculiar. Thus the relations of husbands and wives, it seems to me, are spoiled by that spirit, not only of insubmission, but even of animosity of the women against the men, of rancour, of a desire to show that they are not worse than the men, that they can do the same as the men, and at the same time by the absence of that moral, religious feeling which, if it existed