Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/146

 130 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

In all three cases the thing defined is not the real essence of religion, but something people believe in and consider to be religion.

The first definition substitutes for the conception of religion a faith held by the definer ; the second defini- tion substitutes a faith held by other people : something they take to be religion — while tlie third definition sub- stitutes people's faith in something supplied to them as religion.

But what is faith.'* And why do people hold the faith they do hold.'* What is faith, ana how did it arise }

Among the great mass of the cultured crowd of to- day it is considered a settled question that the essence of every religion consists in superstitious fear, aroused by the not-understood phenomena of Nature, and in the personification and deification of these natural forces, and the worship of them.

This opinion is credulously accepted, without criti- cism, by the culture<l crowd of to-day ; and not only is it not refuted by the scientists, but among them it generally finds its strongest supporters. If voices are now and then heard (such as that of Max Miiller and others) attributing to religion another origin and mean- ing, they pass almost unheard and uimoticed among the common and unanimous acknowledgment of religion in general as a manifestation of ignorance and super- stition. Not long ago, at the commencement of the nineteenth centurj', the most advanced men — if (like the Encyclopedists of the later part of the eighteenth century) they rejected Catholicism, Protestantism, and Russo-Greek Orthodoxy — never denied that religion in general has been, and is, an indispensable condition of life for every man. Not to mention the Deists (such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, and Rousseau), Voltaire erected a monument to God, and Robespierre instituted a fete of the Supreme Being. But in our time — thanks to the frivolous and superficial teaching of Auguste Comte (who, like most Frenchmen, really believed Christianity to be the same thing as Catho-