Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/370

 354 ESSAYS AND LETfERS

from which alone any firm moral laws can he deduced — is something man has outlived, the deniers of religion involuntarily postulate as the basis of human activity simply self-love, and the bodily appetites that flow therefrom.

And among these people sprang up that teaching of egotism, evil and hatred, which (though it was always present in hidden, latent form in the life-conception of the materialists) at first showed itself timidly, but has latterly been so vividly and deliberately expressed in the doctrines of Nietzsche, and is now spreading so rapidly, evoking the most coarsely animal and cruel instincts in mankind.

So that, on the one hand, the so-called believers find complete approval of their evil way of life in your teaching, which recognises as compatible with Christ- ianity those actions and conditions which are most contrary to it ; while, on the other hand, unbelievers — arriving at the denial of ail religion, as a consequence of your teaching — wipe out all distinction between good and evil, preach a doctrine of inequality among men, of egotism, of strife, and of the oppression of the weak by the strong — and preach this as tiie highest truth attain- able by man.

You, and none but you, by your teaching forcibly instilled into people, are the cause of this dreadful evil from which they suffer so cruelly.

Most terrible of all is the fact that, while causing this evil, you do not believe the teaching you preach ; not only do not believe all the assertions of which it is composed, but often do not believe a single one of them.

I know that, repeating the celebrated credo quia ahsurdum, many of you think that, in spite of every- thing, you do believe all that you preach. But the fact that you say you believe that God is a Trinity, or that the heavens opened and the voice of God spoke from up there, or that Jesus rose up into the heavens