Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/200

190 that despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." "That sort of religion would never answer!" he exclaimed indignantly, allowing the book to fall from his hand. "What? Love the French? Do good to them? Pray for them? I think whoever recommended you, just now, the reading of this book, must have gone altogether out of his senses. We should all be ruined if such ideas as these got abroad amongst us, especially at the present moment, when it is our supreme duty to hate the enemies of the Czar and to destroy them."

"Then how comes it to pass that the Czar himself loves this book and reads it daily?" asked Tolstoi, as he reverently took up the volume from the ground.

"I cannot believe that," said Ivan.

"It is quite true. I heard it from my uncle, who, as you know, is always about his person. It was that which made me read it first. Now I love it—better than any other book in the world."

"Since you tell me all this, I will buy a copy, and take it with me to the camp. Pope Yefim would be pleased if he knew it. He has sometimes lamented to me that the unlearned cannot have the Scripture narratives in any tongue they are able to understand. There is the old Slavonic, of course, but you might almost as well try to read Babylonish."

"There is French—for us," said Tolstoi; "and I own that it seems a better thing to me to read the sayings of Christ than the scoffs of Voltaire."

"Perhaps you are right," Ivan answered thoughtfully. After a pause he added, "Since I have stood alone, like one on a rock in the midst of a raging sea, with death before me, death behind me, and death on each side of me, I have sometimes thought what strength it would give me if only I could look up