Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/319

 VV^HAT IS RELIGION ? 303

doctrine that an angry and revengeful God punishes all men for Adam^s sin^ and sent his son on earth to save them_, knowing beforehand that men would kill him and would therefore be damned ; and that salvation from sin consists in being baptized^ or in believing that all these things really happened, and that the son of God was killed by men that men might be saved, and that God will punish with eternal torments those who do not believe this ?

So that, leaving aside things some people consider as additions to the chief dogmas of this religion — things such as various relics, icons of various Mothers of God,^ prayers asking for favours and addressed to saints each of whom has his own speciality — and not to speak also of the Protestant doctrine of predestination — the very foundations of this religion, admitted by all and formu- lated in the Nicene Creed, are so absurd and immoral, and run so counter to right feeling and to common- sense, that men cannot believe in them. Men may repeat any form of words with their lips, but they cannot believe things that have no meaning. It is possible to say with one's lips : ' I believe the world was created six thousand years ago ^; or, ' believe Christ flew up into the sky and sat down next to his Father ' or, ' God is One and at the same time Three ' — but no one can believe these things, for the words have no sense. And therefore men of our modern world who profess this perverted form of Christianity really believe in nothing at all.

And that is the peculiar characteristic of our time.

People in our time do not believe in anything, yet, using a false definition of faith which they take from the Epistle to the Hebrews (wrongly ascribed to Paul),

many other ' Mothers of God,' are all paintings of Mary the mother of Jesus, to which various miraculous powers are attributed in Kussia.
 * The wonder-working icons of the Kazan, Iberian, and