Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/250

 234 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

the wine is no longer wine, and the white bread is not bread, but they are the blood and flesh of one of the triple Gods, etc. All this is so stupid and senseless that it is quite impossible to understand what it all means. And the very people who teach this faith do not ask you to understand it, but only tell you to believe it ; and people trained to believe these things from childhood can believe any kind of nonsense that is told them. And when men have been so befooled that they believe that God hangs in the corner,* or sits in a morsel of pap which the priest gives out in a spoon ; that to kiss a board or some relic and put candles in front of them, is useful for life here and hereafter — they are next called on to enter the military service, where they are humbugged to any extent ; being first made to swear on tlie Gospel (in which swearing is prohibited) that they will do just what is forbidden in those Gospels, and then taught that to kill people at the word of those in command is not a sin, but that to refuse to obey those in command is a sin. So that the fraud played off on soldiers when it is instilled into them that they may, without sin, kill people at the wish of those in command, is not an isolated fraud, but is bound up with a whole system of deception without which this one fraud would not deceive them.

Only a man quite befooled by the false faith called Orthodoxy, palmed off upon him for true Christian faith, can believe that it is no sin for a Christian to enter the army, promising blindly to obey any man who ranks above him in the service, and, at the will of others, learning to kill, and committing that most terrible crime forbidden by all moral law.

A man free from the pseudo-Christian faith that is called Orthodoxy, will not believe that.

And that is why the so-called Sectarians — Christians

in the corner of each dwelling-room. These icons are called ' gods, ' and are prayed to in a way that often amounts to idolatry.
 * This refers to the common practice of hanging an icon