Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/340

 324 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

so obvious that it strikes one's eye. If these men inten- tionally leave the people in their religious ignorance for the sake of retaining their own profitable position among the minority^ — this is a terrible, a revolting fraud. Men who act so are the very hypocrites Christ especially denounced — the only people He did in fact denounce — and He denounced them because no monsters or malefactors ever brought so much evil into human life as is brought by these men.

But if they are sincere, the only explanation of so strange an eclipse of reason is, that just as the masses are hypnotized by a false religion, so also are the pseudo- enlightened men of to-day hypnotized by a false science which has decided that the chief motor-nerve, that now as heretofore actuates humanity, has become altogether useless, and can be replaced by something else.

This delusion or deceit of the scribes — the educated men of our world — is the peculiarity of our times, and in this lies the cause of the miserable condition in which Christian humanity now lives, as well as of the brutaliza- tion into which it is sinking deeper and deeper.

It is usual for the advanced, educated classes of our world to assert that the false religious beliefs held by the masses are of no special importance, and that it is not worth while, and is unnecessary, to struggle against them directly, as was done by Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau and others. Science, they think — that is to say, the disconnected, casual information they disseminate among the people — will of itself attain that end, and man, having learned how many million miles it is from the earth to the sun, and what metals exist in the sun and the stars, will cease to believe in Church doctrines.

This sincere, or insincere, assertion or assumption covers either a great delusion or a terrible deception. From the very earliest years of childhood — the years most susceptible to suggestion, when those who train