Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/360

 344 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

(though the Salvation Army, which has devised new methods of external action on the feelings, supplies an exception).

But all the strength of the clergy is now directed to a third and most powerful method, which has always heen used, and is now with special jealousy retained by the clergy in their own hands. This method is that of instilling Church doctrine into people who are not in a position to judge of what is given them : for instance, into quite uneducated working people who have no time for thought, and chiefly into children, who accept in- discriminately what is imparted to them and on whose minds it remains permanently impressed.

So that in our day your chief method of imparting to men the truth God has revealed to you, consists in teaching this truth to uneducated adults, and to children who do not reason, but accept everything.

This teaching generally begins with what is called Scripture History : that is to say, with selected passages from the Bible : the Hebrew books of the Old Testa- ment ; which according to your teaching are the work of the Holy Ghost, and are therefore not only unques- tionably true, but also holy. From this history your pupil draws his first notions of the world, of the life of man, of good and evil, and of God.

This Scripture History begins with a description of iiow God, the ever-living, created the sky and the earth 6,000 years ago out of nothing ; how He afterwardp created beasts, fishes, plants, and finally man : Adam, and Adam's wife, who was made of one of Adam's ribs. Then it describes how, fearing lest the man and his wife should eat an apple which had the magic quality of giving knowledge. He forbade them to eat that apple ; how, notwithstanding this prohibition, the first people ate the apple, and were therefore expelled from Para- dise ; and how all their descendants were therefore cursed, and the earth was cursed also, so that since then