Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/172

148 brandy and a red shirt, so it is insufficient to say that the metropolitan of Kief with his monks stuffs sacks with straw and calls them relics of the saints, merely to get thirty thousand rubles a year income. The one act and the other is too terrible and too revolting to human nature for so simple and rude an explanation to be sufficient. Both the executioner and the metropolitan explaining their actions would have a whole series of arguments based chiefly on historical tradition. Men must be executed; executions have gone on since the world commenced. If I don't do it another will. I hope, by God's grace, to do it better than another would. So also the metropolitan would say: External worship is necessary; since the commencement of the world the relics of the saints have been worshiped. People respect the relics in the Kief Catacombs and pilgrims come here; I, by God's grace, hope to make the most pious use of the money thus blasphemously obtained.

To understand the religious fraud it is necessary to go to its source and origin.

We are speaking about what we know of Christianity. Turn to the commencement of Christian doctrine in the Gospels and we find a teaching which plainly excludes the external worship of God, condemning it; and which, with special clearness, positively repudiates mastership. But from the time of Christ onward we find a deviation from these principles laid down by Christ. This deviation begins from the times of the Apostles and especially from that hankerer after mastership—Paul. And the farther Christianity goes the more it deviates, and the more it adopts the methods of external worship and mastership which Christ had so definitely condemned. But in the early times of Christianity the conception of a Church was only employed to refer to all those who shared the beliefs which I consider true.