Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/350

 334 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

any harm, and can only produce the most fruitful results. Government, however, has not only never taken upon itself this duty, but, on the contrary, has always and everywhere maintained with the greatest jealousy any false, effete religion prevalent at the period, and has in every way persecuted those who have tried to inform the people of the principles of true religion. In reality this cannot be otherwise ; for Governments to expose the falsity of the present religions, and to preach the true one, would be as if a man were to cut down the branch on which he is sitting.

But if Government will not do this work, it would seem certain that those learned men — who, having freed themselves from the deception of false religion, say they wish to serve the common people whose labour has provided for their education and support — are bound to do it. But these men, like the Government, do not do it : first, because they consider it inexpedient to risk unpleasantness and to suffer the danger of per- secution at the hands of the ruling classes for exposing a fraud which Government protects, and which, in their opinion, will disappear of itself ; secondly, be- cause, considering all religion to be an effete error, they have nothing to offer the people in place of the deception they are expected to destroy.

There remain those great masses of unlearned men who are under the hypnotic influence of Church and Government deception, and who therefore believe that the simulacrum of religion which has been instilled into them is the one true religion, and that there is and can be no other. These masses are under a constant and intense hypnotic influence. Generation after generation they are born and live and die in the stupefied condition in which they are kept by the clergy and the Govern- ment ; and if they free themselves from that influence, they are sure to fall into the school of the scientists who deny religion — when their influence becomes as useless and harmful as the influence of their teachers.

So that for some men the work is unprofitable, while for others it is impossible.