Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/188

164 trust the assertions of those who, like them, have surrendered reason.

Yet the law which men should follow is so plain that it is accessible to every child, the more so as no man has to discover anew the law of his life. Those who have lived before him have discovered and expressed it, and he has but to verify it with his reason, and to accept or refuse those propositions which he finds expressed in tradition; that is, not, as recommended by those who would shirk the law, by verifying reason by tradition, but, on the contrary, by verifying tradition by reason.

Traditions may proceed from men, and be false; but reason indubitably comes from God, and cannot be false. Hence for the recognition and expression of truth no special extraordinary capacity is required; one has but to believe that reason is not only the loftiest sacred capacity of man, but moreover is the sole instrument for the understanding of truth.

Particular intellectual qualities are needful, not for the acquirement and expression of truth, but for the concoction and expression of error. Having once deviated from the directions of reason, distrusting it, and believing what others proclaimed as the truth, men accumulate and accept by faith—for the most part in the form of laws, revelations, dogmas—such intricate, unnatural, and contradictory propositions, that, in order to express them and adapt them to life, great acuteness of mind and special qualities are indeed required.

Only imagine a man of our world, educated on the religious basis of any of the Christian confessions,—Catholic, Greek-Orthodox, Protestant,—who wished to elucidate for himself and adapt to his life the religious fundamental ideas with which he has been inoculated in childhood! What an involved mental labor he must face in order to reconcile all the contradictions included in the faith he has imbibed from his youth.

A righteous God has created evil, persecutes men, demands redemption, and so forth; and we, confessing the law of love and mercy, make war, rob the poor, etc.

In order to disentangle these impossible