Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/462

 nor for any one else entail any obligation or define anything. What can be the love of a God whom every one understands in his own way, and whom others do not recognize at all, and what can be the love for a neighbor as for oneself, when I am filled with a self-love which never for an instant leaves me, and often with a constant hatred to others?

This is all so obscure and impracticable that it remains an empty phrase. My opinion is that this position is metaphysical, very important as such, but when this position is accepted as a rule of life, as a law, then it is simply stupid. And unfortunately it is frequently so understood. I say all this so as to explain that the significance of Christianity, as of every other religion, is not found in metaphysical principles,─metaphysical principles exist in all humanity: Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, have always been and will always be the same,─but in the application of them to life, in the vital production of that happiness of every man and of all humanity which is attained by the application of these principles to life, to explaining the possibility of the application of them and to the definition of the rules whereby it is attained.

Even in Deuteronomy it says: Love God and your neighbor as yourself; but the application of this principle, according to Deuteronomy, consisted in circumcision, the Sabbath, and the criminal law.

The significance of Christianity consists in proving the possibility and the blessedness of fulfilling the law of love. Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, very clearly defined how it was necessary and possible for one's own happiness and that of all men to fulfil this law. In the Sermon on the Mount─without which there would have been no teaching of Christ, what all agree in is that which Christ says, not to the wise, but to the illiterate, the clownish,─in this sermon, which is provided with an introduction in regard to the person who shall break one of the least of the commandments (Matthew v. 17-20), and with an exordium to the effect that it is not necessary to speak but to fulfil (Matthew