Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/531

 and the condition of the Christian should be, never for a minute pausing on the thought that Christianity is the thing which he professes, and that he himself realizes in his own case the condition of a Christian.

And meantime his whole journal is full of expressions of the deepest Christian understanding and feeling. And these expressions affect the reader with especial force, owing to their very unconsciousness and sincerity. He talks to himself, not thinking of any one hearing him, not striving to seem to believe in what he does not believe, not concealing his sufferings and his searchings.

It is as if you were present without the knowledge of the master at the most mysterious and the profoundest and the most passionate inner work of the soul, ordinarily concealed from the sight of strangers.

And so you may find many far more artistic and eloquent expressions of religious feeling than Amiel's, but it would be difficult to find any more sincere or soul-affecting.

Not long before his death, knowing that his illness might at any moment end with suffocation, he wrote:—

"When one does not dream of having before one a decade, a year, a month of reprieve, when one cannot reckon on more than a dozen hours, and the next night brings the threat of the unknown, it is evident that one must renounce art, science, politics, and be content to commune with oneself, and this is possible even to the very end. This interior soliloquy is the sole resource of the man condemned to death when the execution of the sentence is delayed. He collects himself in his inmost tribunal. He no longer radiates, he psychologizes. He no longer acts, he contemplates. … Like the hare he returns to his 'form' to die, and this 'form' is his conscience, his thought. It is also his journal intime. As long as he can hold his pen, and while he has a moment of solitude, he collects himself before this echo of himself, and converses with his God.

"Nevertheless there is not here a moral examination, an act of contrition, a cry of help. It is only an Amen of submission. …." My child, give me thy heart.' {[nop}}