Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/364

 348 ESSAYS AND LETl'ERS

to demonstrate the reasonableness of what is unreason- able, and, worst of all, will discard, together with the superstitions that were instilled into him, all conscious- ness of the necessity for any faith whatever.

In either of these three cases, a man into whom, during childhood, meaningless and contradictory asser- tions have been instilled as religious truth — unless with much effort and suffering he free himself from them — is a man mentally diseased. Such a man, see- ing around him the constantly moving and changing facts of life, cannot without a feeling of desperation watch this movement destroying his conception of life, and cannot but experience (openly or secretly) an un- kindly feeling towards those who co-operate in this reasonable progress. Nor can he help being a con- scious partisan of obscurity and lies against light and truth.

And such the majority of people in Christendom — by the inculcation of nonsensical beliefs deprived from childhood of the capacity to think clearly and firmly — actually are.

Such is the evil done to man^s mind by having it impregnated with Church doctrines. But much worse than this is the moral perversion which that impregna- tion produces in man's soul. Every man comes into the world with a consciousness of his dependence on a mysterious, all-powerfal Source which has given him life, and consciousness of his equality with all men, the equality of all men with one another, a desire to love and be loved, and a consciousness of the need of striving towards perfection. But what do you instil into him ?

Instead of the mysterious Source of which he thinks with reverence, you tell him of an angry, unjust God, who executes and torments people.

Instead of the equality of all men, which the child and the simple man recognise with all their being, you tell them that aot only people, but nations, are unequal ;