Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/378

362 simply an obsolete and superstitious belief, which, like other similar beliefs, is maintained and preached by men not for the benefit of their brother-men but for some other object. And as soon as you have understood that, all those of you who look on life seriously and attend to the voice of conscience, will be unable to continue to preach this doctrine, or to prepare to preach it.

But I hear the usual reply : 'What will become of men if they cease to believe the Church doctrines? Won^t things be worse than they now are?

What will happen if the people of Christendom cease to believe in Church doctrine } The result will be — that not the Hebrew leg-ends alone, but the religious wisdom of the whole world, will become accessible and intelligible to them. People will grow up and develop with unperverted understandings and feelings. Having discarded a teaching accepted credulously, people will order their relation towards God reasonably, in conformity with their knowledge ; and will recognise the moral obligations flowing from that relation.

'But will not the results be worse?

If the Church doctrine is not true — how can it be worse for men not to have falsehood preached to them as truth, especially in a way so unfair as is now adopted for the purpose ?

'But,' some people say, 'the common folk are coarse and uneducated ; and what we, educated people, do not require, may yet be useful and even indispensable for the masses?

If all men are made alike, then all must travel one and the same path from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, from falsehood to truth. You have travelled that road and have attained consciousness of the unreliability of the belief in which you were trained. By what right, then, will you check others from making the same advance ?

You say, that though you do not need such food, it