Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/152

 13G ESSAYS AND LETTERS

Buddhists, and Taoists, in their hei^t representatives, l)Ut which received its complete and final expression only in Christianity, in its true and unperverted mean- ing. All the ritual of those ancient religions that pro- ceeded from this understanding of life, and, in our time, all the external forms of worsliip among the Unitarians, Universalists, Quakers, Servian Nazarenes, Russian Doukhob6rs,and all the so-called rationalistic sects : their sermons, hymns, conferences and books, are religious manifestations of this relation of man to the universe.

All possible religions of whatever kind can, by the nature of the ca>e, be classed according to these tiiree ways of regarding the universe.

Every man wlio has emerged from the animal state inevitably adopts the first, or the second, or the third, of these relations, and that is what constitutes each man's true religion, no matter to what faith he may nominally belong.

Every man necessarily conceives some relation be- tween himself and the universe, for an intelligent being cannot live in the universe that surrounds him, without having some relation to it. And since man has as yet devised but three relations that we know of to the universe — it follows that every man inevitably holds one of these three, and, whether lie wishes to or not, belongs to one of the three fundamental religions among which the human race is divided.

Therefore the assertion, very common among the cultured crowd of Christendom, that they have risen to such a height of development that they no longer need, or possess, any religion, only amounts to this — that repudiating the Christian religion, which is the only one natural to our time, they hold to the lower, social, family, State religion, or to the primitive pagan religion, without being aware of the fact. A man without a religion — i.e., without any relation to the universe — is as impossible as a man without a heart. He may not know he has a religion, just as a man may not know lie has a heart, but he can no more exist without a religion than without a heart.