Page:Tolstoy - Demands of Love and Reason.djvu/31

 28 DEMANDS OF LOVE peasant woman's, is the highest conception to which her consciousness has attained; a faith that will not contradict her understanding of the facts of life, but will illuminate, elucidate, bring into harmony all her knowledge. The lady will not understand me, because she requires the peasant woman's faith to enable to live as she is living; that is, in an ungodly way, daily consuming upon her whims and luxuries the labor of hundreds of working men, and at the same time talking of God and Christ, and of her piety. Only by assimilating and professing the faith of the peasant woman—in other words, the faith of people who lived two thousand years ago—is such an ungodly life, with its self-satisfied piety, possible for her. Therefore, so far as the lady is concerned, I can understand. But for you, who are exiled to the end of the earth, and are being taken a prisoner from place to place because you wish to realize in your life the Christian truths—for you, why is this dreadful deception necessary, this insoluble contradiction between your beliefs and your knowledge and understanding of the facts of life? Why, only think of what you profess, and of the position in which you stand. I can understand that it is very good and pleasant to feel oneself in union with those around one, and that when, in Lent, church bells are tolling for