Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/155

14 wings and fly up and one finds relief, and one's burden disappears.

This is what has happened to me: I began to think more and more abstractedly about the problems of life—In what does life consist? What is its aim? What is love?—and I got farther and farther away, not only from the Old Testament conception of God the Creator, but also from the conception of Him as a Father, the righteous source of all life, and of my own being. And the Devil ensnared me, and it began to enter my mind that it is possible, and especially desirable (for union with the Chinese Confucians, with the Buddhists, and our own atheists and agnostics) altogether to avoid this conception. I thought it was possible to restrict oneself to the conception and acknowledgment of that God only which is in me, without acknowledging any God apart from that—without acknowledging the one who has implanted in me a particle of Himself. And, strange to say, I suddenly began to feel dull, depressed, and alarmed. I did not know the cause of this, but I felt that I had suddenly undergone a dreadful spiritual fall, had lost all spiritual joy and energy.

And then only did I comprehend