Page:Tolstoy - Demands of Love and Reason.djvu/25

 once deviated from the directions of reason, distrusting it, and confidently believing what others proclaimed as the truth, men accumulate and accept by faith — for the most part in the form of laws, revelations, dogmas—such intricate, unnatural, and contradictory propositions, that to express and adapt them to life great acuteness of mind and special qualities are indeed required.

Only imagine a man of our world, educated on the religious basis of any of the Christian confessions—Catholic, Greek, orthodox Protestant—who wished to elucidate for himself and adapt to his life the religious fundamental ideas with which he has been inoculated in childhood ! What mental labour he must face to be able to reconcile all the contradictions involved in the faith he has imbibed from his youth!

A righteous God has created evil, persecutes men, demands redemption, and so forth; and we, professing the law of love and mercy, execute, make war, rob the poor, etc.

To disentangle these impossible contradictions, or, rather, to conceal them from oneself, much mental capacity and special talent are indeed necessary ; but, to learn the law of one’s life, or, as already expressed, to bring one’s faith into complete consciousness, no special mental capacity is required; one has but to refuse to admit anything contrary to