Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/516

 the duties of either, duties which are not invented by men, but lie in the nature of things. From this same difference results the valuation of man's and woman's virtue and vice,—a valuation which has existed through all the ages and which can never cease to exist, so long as men have reason.

It has always been so, and it will always be so, that a man who has passed his life in his manifold male labour, and a woman who has passed her life in bearing, nursing, and bringing up her children, will feel that they are doing what is right, and they will evoke men's respect and love, because both have fulfilled their indubitable destiny. Man's destiny is more varied and broader, woman's destiny is more uniform and narrower, but deeper, and so it has always been and it always will be so that a man, who has hundreds of duties and has been false to one or ten of them, will not be a bad or harmful man, so long as he has performed nine-tenths of his destiny. But a woman, who has three duties, will, by becoming untrue to one of them, perform only two-thirds of them, and, having become untrue to two, becomes negative, harmful. Public opinion has always been such and always will be such, because such is the essence of the matter. A man, to do God's will, must serve Him in the sphere of physical labour, and of thought, and of morality; with all these works is he able to accomplish his destiny; for woman the means for serving God are preëminently and almost exclusively (because no one but her can do it) the children.

Man is called to serve God only through his works; woman is called to serve only through her children.

And so the love of her children, which is inherent in woman, the exclusive love, with which it is quite vain to struggle by means of reason, will always be, and always must be, peculiar to the woman as mother. This love for the child in babyhood is not at all egoism, as we are falsely taught to believe, but the love of the labourer for