Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/18

2 The fundamental thought of the book is the following: In all the affairs of life the important thing is to know, not what is good and necessary, but what of all the good and necessary things in existence comes first in importance, what second, what third, and so on.

If that is important in worldly affairs, yet more is it important in matters of faith, which define man's duties.

Tatian, a teacher of the early Church, says that men's sufferings come not so much from their not knowing God, as from their acknowledging a false god and esteeming as God that which is not God. The same thought applies to the duties men acknowledge. Misfortune and evil come, not so much from men not knowing their duties, as from the fact that they acknowledge false duties and esteem as duties things that are not really such, while they do not recognise as a duty that which is really their first duty. Bóndaref declares that the misfortunes and evil in men's lives come from regarding many empty and harmful regulations as religious duties, while forgetting, and hiding from themselves and others, that chief, primary, undoubted duty announced at the beginning of the Holy Scriptures: 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.'

For those who believe in the sanctity and infallibility of the word of God as expressed in the Bible, the command there given by God Himself, and nowhere revoked, is sufficient proof of its own validity. But for those who do not acknowledge the Holy Scriptures, the importance and validity of this commandment (if only it be considered without prejudice as a simple, not supernatural, expression of human wisdom) may be proved by a consideration of the conditions of human life, as is done by Bóndaref in his book.

An obstacle to such consideration unfortunately exists in the fact that many of us are so accustomed to hear from theologians perverted and senseless interpretations of the words of Holy Scripture, that the mere reminder that a certain principle coincides with the teachings of Scripture, is enough to cause some people to distrust that principle.