Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/403

Rh however pleasant it might be for me, I had no right to sacrifice my children, and for their sake I continued to live as before, in order to bring them up in the same conditions as I myself had grown up and lived."

"Strange," said Pamphilius; "we take diametrically opposite views. We say: 'If grown people live a worldly life it can be forgiven them, because they are already corrupted; but children! That is horrible! To live with them in the world and tempt them! Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that by whom the offense cometh.'

"So spake our Teacher, and I do not say this to you as a refutation, but because it is actually so. The chiefest obligation that we have to live as we do arises from the fact that amongst us are children,—those beings of whom it is said, Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."

"But how can a Christian family do without definite means of subsistence?"

"According to our faith there is only one means of subsistence,—loving labor for men. For your means of livelihood you depend on violence. It can be destroyed as wealth is destroyed, and then all that is left is the labor and love of men. We consider that we must hold fast by that which is the basis of everything, and that we must increase it. And when this is done, then the family lives and prospers.

"No," continued Pamphilius; "if I were in doubt as to the truth of Christ's teaching, and if I were hesitating as to the fulfilling of it, then my doubts and hesitations would instantly come to an end if I thought about the fate of children brought up among the heathen in those conditions in which you grew up, and are educating your children. Whatever we, a few people, should do for the arrangement of our lives, with palaces, slaves, and the imported products of foreign lands, the life of the majority of men would still remain what it must be. The only security of that life will remain, love of mankind and labor. We wish to free ourselves