Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/570

546 arguments do not justify them, that they are not at all required by the working-men, and that they profit by the labor of these men, not on account of any division of labor, but simply because they have the power to do so, and because they are so perverted that they cannot dispense with this labor.

And all this arises from people imagining that it is possible to lead a good life, without first acquiring the first quality which is necessary for a righteous life.

And this first quality is temperance.

never has been, and cannot be, a righteous life without temperance. Apart from temperance no righteous life is imaginable. The attainment of righteousness must commence with it.

There is a scale of virtues, and it is necessary, if one would mount the higher steps, to begin with the lowest; and the first virtue a man must acquire, if he wishes to acquire the others, is that which the ancients called or, i.e. reasonableness or self-control.

If in the Christian teaching temperance was included in the conception of self-renunciation, still the order of succession remains the same, and the acquirement of no Christian virtue is possible without temperance,—and this not because such a rule has been invented by any one, but because such is the essential nature of the matter.

But even temperance, the first step in every righteous life, is not attainable all at once, but only by degrees.

Temperance is the liberation of man from desires,—their subordination to reasonableness,. But a man's desires are many and various, and in order successfully to contend with them he must begin with the fundamental ones,—those upon which the more complicated ones have grown up, and not with those complex lusts which have grown up upon the fundamental ones.