Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/64

 passionate man may, at first, be attracted by this ideal, but will not hold to it, and when once he has broken down, not knowing or acknowledging any fixed rules, he will lapse into complete depravity.'

So people generally argue: 'Christ's ideal is unattainable, therefore it cannot serve as a guide in practical life; it may do to talk about, or dream about, but it is not applicable to life, and must therefore be put aside. We do not want an ideal, but a rule—a guidance—suited to our strength and to the average level of the moral forces of our society: honourable Church-marriage; or even a marriage not quite honourable, in which one party (as occurs with men among us) has already known many other women; or, say, marriage with the possibility of divorce, or civil marriage, or even (advancing in the same direction) a marriage, Japanese fashion, for a certain term'—but why not go as far as brothels? They are said to be preferable to street prostitution!

That is where the trouble comes in. Once you let yourself lower the ideal to suit your weakness, there is no finding the line at which to stop.

In reality, this argument is altogether unsound. It is untrue that an ideal of infinite perfection cannot be a guide in life, and that I must either throw it away, saying, 'It is useless to me since I can never reach it,' or must lower it to the level at which it suits my weakness to rest.

To argue so is as though a mariner said to himself: 'Since I cannot keep to the line indicated by the compass, I must either throw the compass overboard and cease to bother with it' (i.e., must discard the ideal); 'or I must fix the needle of the compass in the position which corresponds to the direction my vessel is now following' (i.e., must lower the ideal to suit my own weakness).

The ideal of perfection Jesus gave is not a fancy, or a theme for rhetorical sermons, but is an indispensable and accessible guide to moral life, as the compass is an indispensable and accessible instrument where