Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/376

 360 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

sin^ and of the redemption of man by the death of the son of God.

All you can effect by your false, pseudo-scientific argumentations, and (what counts for more) by your authority, will be temporarily to retain in hypnotic submission to a false faith, those who are awakening from its influence and preparing to free themselves from it.

That is what you are doing ; and it is a very evil work. Instead of employing your mental powers to free yourselves and others from the fraud you and they are involved in, and which causes you and them to suffer, you use your powers yet further to entangle yourselves and them.

You, the clergy of this class, should not entangle yourselves and others by obscure argumentation, should not try to demonstrate that truth is what you call truth ; but, on the contrary, making an effort, you should try to verify the beliefs you have accepted as truth — by comparing them with what you and everyone else accept as sure knowledge, and also by the simple demands of common-sense. You need only sincerely set your- selves that task, and you will at once awake from the hypnotic sleep in which you now are — and the terrible delusion in which you have lived will become clear to you.

So it is with this second class, the philosophizing clergy, who in our day are very numerous and most harmful.

But there is also a third, most numerous, class of simple-minded clergy who have never doubted the truth of the faith they profess and preach. These men have either never thought about the sense and meaning of the affirmations taught them in their childhood as sacred divine truth ; or, if they have thought, were so unaccustomed to independent thinking, that they did not see the incompatibilities and contradictions in- volved in those affirmations, or, seeing them, were yet so overpowered by the authority of the Church tradi- tion that thev have not dared to think otherwise than