Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/499

 In order that men should change their way of living and feeling, they must first of all change their way of thinking; and in order that such a change should come about, men must stop and give their attention to what they ought to understand. To hear what those who wish to save them are shouting, men who run singing toward the precipice must cease their hubbub and stop short.

Let the people of our Christian society pause in their work and reflect for a moment on the state of their lives, and involuntarily they will be led to accept the conception of life given by Christianity; a conception so natural, so simple, and answering so completely the needs of the heart and mind of humanity, that it would arise almost spontaneously in the understanding of any one willing to liberate himself, were it but for a moment, from the entanglement in which he is held by the complications of his own work and the work of others.

For eighteen centuries the feast has been ready; but one man does not come because he has bought a piece of ground, another because he has married a wife, a third because he must go and try his oxen, a fourth because he is constructing a railway, a factory, doing missionary work, working in Parliament, in a bank, or at some scientific, artistic, or literary production. For two thousand years nobody has had the leisure to do what Jesus advised at the beginning of His ministry: to look around him, to consider the results of our work, and to ask himself: What am I? For what? Can it be that this force, which has produced me with my reason and my desire to love and be loved, has operated only in order to deceive me; so that, having imagined the aim of my life to be my personal well-being,—that my life belongs to me and that I have the right to dispose of it and the lives of other beings as I please,—I should arrive at the conviction that this personal, family, or national well-being cannot be attained; and that the more I strive to attain it, the more I should find myself in contradiction with my reason and the desire to love and be loved, and the more I should experience disillusionment and suffering? Is it not more probable that,