Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/361

 AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY 345

it has grown weeds. Then the life of Adara^s de- scendants is described : how they became so perverted that God not only drowned them all, but drowned all the animals with them, and left alive only Noah and his family and the animals he took into the ark. Then it describes how God chose Abraham alone of all people, and made an agreement with him ; which ag-reement was that Abraham was to consider God to be God, and. as a sign of this, was to be circumcised. On His side God undertook to give Abraliam a numerous progeny, and to patronize him and all his oifspring. Then it tells how God, patronizing- Abraham and his descendants, performed on their behalf most unnatural actions called miracles, and most terrible cruelties. So that the whole of this history — excepting certain stories, which are sometimes naive (as the visit of God with two angels to Abraham, the marriage of Isaac, and others), and are sometimes innocent, but are often immoral (as the swindles of God's favourite, Jacob, the cruelties of Samson, and the cunning of Joseph) — the whole of this history, from the plagues Moses called down upon the Egyptians, and the murder by an angel of all their firstborn, to the fire that destroyed 250 conspirators, the tumbling into the ground of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and the destruction of 14,700 men in a few minutes, and on to the sawing of enemies with saws,* and the execution of the priests who did not agree with him by Elijah (who rode up into the sky), and to the story of Elisha, who cursed the boys that laughed at him, so that they were torn in pieces and eaten by two bears — all this history is a series of miraculous occur- rences and of terrible crimes, committed by the Hebrew people, by their leaders, and by God Himself.

in which he says that this passage shows Tolstoy's ignorance of the Bible, it may be well here to quote 1 Chron. xx. 3 : 'And he brought forth the people that were therein, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes. And thus did David unto all the cities of the children of Aramon.'
 * Father John of Kronstadt having published an article