Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/174

 158 ESSAYS AND LEITEKS

Traditions may come from man and be false, but reason certainly comes from God and cannot be false. And, therefore, no specially fj:reat ca|)acities are needed to know and express the truth, but we need only believe tliat reason not only is tlie highest, the divine quality in man, but that it is the only instrument he j>ossesse> for tlie attainment of truth.

Special talents and intellectual g^ifts are needed, not for tlie knowledge and statement of truth, but for tlu' invention and statement of falsehood. Once they abandon the indications of reason, and, instead of believing them, credulously accept what is offered to tliem as truth, jKJople i)ile up and credulously accept (usually in the guise of laws, revelations, and dogma>) such complex, unnatural and contradictory ])ropositions, that to express them and connect them with any trutii really needs great subtlety of mind and exceptional gifts. One need only imagine to one's self a man of our world, educated in the religious beliefs of any one of tlie Christian Churches — Catholic, Ilusso-Greek Ortho- dox, or Protestant — who should wish to elucidate the religious principles with which he has been inoculated in childhood, and to connect them with real life — what a complex intellectual labour he would have to j>erform in order to adjust all the contradictions contained in the faith with which his education had inoculated him : a God, who is the Creator and is good — creates evil, condemns people, and demands a ransom, etc. ; and we ourselves profess a law of love and forgiveness, yet we execute, make war, take their produce from the poor, etc.

For the disentanglement of these insoluble contra- dictions, or, rather, in order to hide them from one's self, great ability and special mental endou-ments are necessary ; but to know tlie law of one's life, or, as you express it, to attain full and clear understanding of one's belief, no special mental gifts are required — we only need be careful not to accept anything con- trary to reason, not to deny our reason, religiously to guard our reason and believe in it alone. If the mean-