Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/34

 approach. In moments of temptation, in moments of fall even, cease not to be conscious of that towards which thou art aspiring, and say to thyself: "I am falling, I hate the fall, and I know that if not now, then later, the victory will not be his, but mine."

It is not the aim of complete chastity which man should put before himself, but that of approach towards it. Chaste, a living man, strictly speaking, can never be. A living man can only strive towards chastity, simply because he is not chaste but lustful. If man were not lustful, there would be for him no chastity nor any conception of it. The mistake consists in putting before oneself the aim of complete chastity (external chastity) and not that of striving towards chastity, of the inner acknowledgment always and in all circumstances of life, of the supremacy of chastity over dissipation, of greater purity over lesser. This mistake is very important. For a man who has placed external chastity before himself as his aim, divergence from it, a fall, destroys everything and arrests the possibility of activity and life; for a man who has placed before himself the aim of striving towards chastity, there is no fall, no cessation of activity; and for him temptations and falls may not interrupt his striving towards chastity, they often even increase it.

... When a man knows no other welfare than personal pleasure for himself alone, love -"being in love" -appears a step upward; but having experienced the feeling of love to God and to one's neighbor, having become Christian, be it in ever so feeble a degree if only the feeling be sincere, one cannot help regarding "being in love," from this higher position, as a feeling from which it is desirable to become