Page:The Kingdom of God is within you, by Leo Tolstoy.pdf/114

 in the animal life. And so to this animal force of movement Christ, as it were, applies the new force—the reco-g nition of Divine perfection—and thereby directs the move ment by the resultant of these two forces.

To suppose that human life is going in the direction to which Christ pointed it, is just like supposing that a little boat afloat on a rapid river, and directing its course almost exactly against the current, will progress in that direction.

Christ recognizes the existence of both sides of the parallelogram, of both eternal indestructible forces of which the life of man is compounded; the force of his animal nature and the force of the consciousness of kinship to God. Saying nothing of the animal force which asserts itself, remains always the same, and is therefore independent of human will, Christ speaks only of the Divine force, calling upon a man to know is more closely, to set it more free from all that retards it, and to carry it to a higher degree of intensity.

In the process of liberating, of strengthening this force, the true life of man, according to Christ's teaching, consists. The true life, according to preceding religions, consists in carrying out rules, the law; according to Christ's teaching is consists in an ever closer approximation to the divine perfection held up before every man, and recognized within himself by every man, in an ever closer and closer approach to the perfect fusion of his will in the will of God, that fusion toward which man strives, and the attainment of which would be the destruction of the life we know.

The divine perfection is the asymptote of human life to which it is always striving, and always approaching, though can only be reached in infinity.

The Christian religion seems to exclude the possibility of life only when men mistake the pointing to an ideal as the laying down of a rule. It is only then that the principles