Chapter II: Part 2

"In his writings on religious questions he clearly shows himself
an enemy of the Russian Orthodox Church. He does not recognize God
in three persons (or three persons in one God), and he calls the
Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, a mortal human being.
He scoffs at the idea of Incarnation. He perverts the text of the
Gospel. He censures the Holy Church and calls it a human institution.
He denies the Church Hierarchy and ridicules the Holy Sacraments and
the rites of the Holy Orthodox Church. Therefore, the Holy Synod
has decreed that no priest is to absolve Count Tolstoy, or give
him communion. Nor is he to be given burial ground, unless, before
departing this life he shall repent, acknowledge the Orthodox Church,
believe in it, and return to it."

Died unreconciled
with church.

He never recanted. He never changed his attitude towards the errors and wrongs of the Russian orthodox church. And no one who ever stood and talked with him, face to face, could ever have believed that that modern Prometheus, that stern and fearless personality, that re-incarnation of Mattathias of old, and of his valiant sons, the Maccabees, could ever swerve from a position once taken by him. When upon his death-bed, he was frequently importuned to return as a penitent to the mother-church; he spurned every mention of it. He was still in the possession of his senses, he said, he still knew and believed that twice two equals four, and as long as he knew and believed this so long would he continue to know and to believe that what he had said and written concerning the errors and wrongs of the church was the truth.

Never a truer
follower of Jesus
than he.

It is noteworthy, and quite in keeping with the general tenor of the Russian orthodox church, that no cognizance was taken by the church of the many noble things Tolstoy had said and written and done; no cognizance of the self-sacrificing efforts he had made to live the life which Jesus had lived and had enjoined upon his followers; no cognizance of his having conscientiously endeavored to square his life with the teachings of the _Sermon on the Mount_; no cognizance of his having brought light to those in darkness and comfort to those in sorrow, of his having consorted and labored with the poor and lightened their burden, of his having thirsted and hungered after righteousness, of his having sought peace and protested against war, and preached the gospel of the wrongfulness of all physical resistance, of his having, though of the oldest nobility, spurned luxury and ease and even money, having regarded these the source of corruption and the root of many of the evils in society.

Yet refused Christian
burial.

Such a person, and one even but half as good as this, should have been entitled to sepulture in the most sacred of Christian cemeteries, and the most eminent of priests should have deemed it a privilege to have been permitted to perform the last rites over his mortal remains. So would it have happened among rational people, but so could it not have happened in Russia. There, because he could not subscribe to doctrines and rites and ceremonies for which he found neither scriptural nor rational warrant, priests felt themselves disgraced, and in danger of eternal damnation, even when their names were associated with that of Tolstoy.

Priest objected
to his name being
associated with
Tolstoy's.

A striking illustration of this was given, seven years ago, at the university of Dorpat, at the occasion of the celebration of its hundredth anniversary. In commemoration of that event the institution elected as honorary members of the corporation a number of Russians distinguished in literature, science and art, one of these was Tolstoy, another was Ivan, the miracle-working priest of Cronstadt, elected to allay the church's indignation at the choice of Tolstoy. Ivan, the priest, refused the honor, and in the following letter to the Rector of the University:

"YOUR EXCELLENCY--I have read your estimable and respectful letter
to me, which is so full of subtle delicacy--I decline absolutely
the honor of the membership to which I have been elected. I do not
wish to become connected, in any way, with a corporation--however
respectable and learned--which, by some lamentable misunderstanding,
has put me side by side with that atheist Leo Tolstoy--the most
malignant heretic of our unfortunate age--who, in presumption and
arrogance, surpasses all previous heretics of any age. I do not wish
to stand beside Antichrist. I am surprised furthermore, to see with
what indifference the University Council regards that satanic author,
and with what slavishness it burns incense to him."

IVAN SERGEIEF, _Prior and Archpriest of the Cronstadt Cathedral_.

This letter tells of the attitude of the church towards Tolstoy better than any words of mine can tell. And this same Ivan, it is said, approved of the massacre of the petitioners of St. Petersburg on that memorable White Sunday, and when petitioned to protect the Jews against threatening massacres, treated the appeal with silent contempt.

Government hatred
back of that of the
church.

It is to be remembered, however, that over and back of the Church of Russia stands the government. The Czar is the head of the church. Whom the government favors the church favors; whom the government hates, the church hates. The church hated Tolstoy because the government hated him, and why it hated him we shall be told in the next discourse of this series.

My Visit to Tolstoy.

(_Continued._)

A DISCOURSE, AT TEMPLE KENESETH ISRAEL,
BY
RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D.

Philadelphia, January 1st, 1911.

Government used
church for
discrediting Tolstoy.

Speaking in our last discourse of the church's excommunication of Tolstoy, and of its refusing a resting place to his remains in what she calls "consecrated ground," we said that the Czar is the spiritual as well as the temporal head of the Church of Russia, and that the hated of the church is yet more the hated of the government. This statement explains what otherwise is difficult to understand, namely, how so good a man as Tolstoy, who, for more than two score years, strove to square his life with the teachings of the _Sermon on the Mount_, could have incurred the hatred of the Russian orthodox Church. The government had far more reason to hate Tolstoy than had the church. Finding it impolitic to proceed directly against him, it availed itself of the church for discrediting Tolstoy in the eyes of the credulous populace.

Before giving reason
why.

Before entering upon a discussion as to why the government feared Tolstoy, we must first have a glimpse of his earlier years, and briefly follow his heroic self-extrication from the corruption of the aristocratic society into which he was born, and his gradual rise to the exalted station of greatest reformer in the history of Russia.

Must hear story of
his life.

He was born eighty-two years ago of an ancient noble family. His childhood years were spent in the midst of the gay military life of Moscow. Yet more gay and more corrupt was the society that surrounded him during his university life. Experiencing a revulsion of feeling against the kind of life he was leading, he fled from the university before graduation, returned to his family estate at Yasnaya Polyana and took up the life of a farmer.

This impetuous flight, and a later one of which we shall hear presently, may throw some light upon his last flight, a few weeks ago, which came to a pathetic end, and of which we shall speak in our next discourse.

His early glory and
shame.

Five years long he lived the life of a peasant, when a call to arms landed him on the battlefields of the Crimea, where he soon won distinction for heroic service. But the dissoluteness of campaign-life soon disclosed that the Tartar in him was not yet dead. He returned to the debaucheries of his former years, and, according to his own confession, with all the greater zest, because of the double glory that had come to him, that of a distinguished soldier and of a brilliant author. He had taken to story-writing, and displayed in it a talent that made success instantaneous. He became the lion of his day, and was courted by high and low. And the greater his glory the more unrestrained grew his libertinism.[1]

[1] See his book "_My Confession_."

His reform.

But there were lucid intervals, now and then, during which he held up to himself the lofty ideals of his former peasant life, and bitterly he denounced himself, and even portrayed himself unsparingly in the character-sketches of some of his novels. His better self acquired mastery at last; he threw off the yoke that had held him fast to the corrupt society of his day, and for the second time he fled to his estate.

He himself told of the circumstance that led to that flight. He had attended a ball at the home of a prominent nobleman, and passed the night in dancing and feasting, leaving his peasant-coachman waiting for him outside, in an open sleigh, in a bitter cold night. When at four in the morning he wished to return home, he found the coachman seemingly frozen dead, and it required several hours of strenuous effort to restore him to consciousness and to save his life. "Why," he asked himself, "should I, a rich, young aristocrat, who has done nothing for society, spend the night amid warmth and luxuries and feastings, while this peasant who represents the class that has built our cities, given us our food and clothing and other necessities, be kept outside to freeze?" He resolved, then and there, to dedicate the remainder of his life to the righting of this and other wrongs. And he kept his promise.

How strong an impression this incident made upon him may be gathered from an indirect allusion to it, in his novel "_Master and Man_," published some two score years later.

Consecrates life to
peasant.

It was discouraging work at first. The people whom he desired to benefit had no faith in him. They could not conceive of an aristocrat, to whom the serfs had been no more than worms to be trod upon, becoming suddenly interested in their welfare. There were long spells of utter disheartenment. A number of times he found himself at the brink of suicide. He sought relief and diversion in travel, but returned more convinced than ever of the corruptions and evils of society, of the tyranny of the classes and of the sufferings of the masses.

Marriage opened at last a new vista of life to him. Aided and stimulated by his cultured and companionable wife he entered upon his reform work by directing a powerful search-light on the goings-on among the high and the low, in a series of novels that secured for him at once rank among the greatest novelists of his age.

Aided by his writings.

In the second discourse of this series, I spoke of his having deprecated his novels, and of his having expressed his preference for his ethical and religious and sociological and economical and political writings. I ventured to say to him that but for his novels he would have gotten but comparatively few people to look into his other writings, that his fiction had secured a world-wide audience, that they contained many of the teachings of his other books, and that the public swallows a moral pill easiest when offered in the form of a novel. To which he replied "Most readers swallow the sugar-coating and leave the pill untouched, or, if they swallow it, it remains unassimilated."

His novels criticized.

And he was right. I have heard much criticism of Tolstoy's novels. Some find him too realistic, too plain spoken, even coarse. A certain magazine that had begun publishing his "_Resurrection_" was obliged to discontinue the story, because of complaints by many of its readers. It was a sad commentary, not on the morals of the writer but on the lack of morals, or on the false modesty, of the readers, for that novel has been declared by eminent critics to be "the greatest and most moral novel ever written." Others again value his realism for whatever spice they might find therein, little heeding the serious purpose for which the story was written.

Few know meaning of
novel in Russia.

At best, few people understand the meaning of a novel in such a country as Russia, where free press, free pulpit, free platform and free speech are unknown, where the novelist attempts to do the work of all of these, under the guise of fiction, the only form of literature that has a chance to pass the eye of the censor. Whole systems of political and social and moral reform are crowded between the covers of a novel, which, if published in any other form of literature, would condemn the author to life-long imprisonment in the Siberian mines. The novelist in Russia does not look upon himself as an entertainer nor as a money-maker, neither is he looked upon as such. He is the prophet, the leader, the teacher, the tribune of the people, the liberator--the emancipation of the Russian serfs, for instance, was entirely due to the novel. He has serious work to do, and he does it seriously. His eye is not upon rhetoric nor upon aesthetics, but upon the evil he has to uproot, on the corruption he has to expose, on the reform he has to institute, on the philosophy of life he has to unfold, and to do that means the production of a novel like "_Anna Karénina_" or of a play like "_The Power of Darkness_." He speaks not to English or American puritans, but to Russians, whose receptivity of strong, plain speech is healthier than ours.

Spoke as a prophet
and reformer.

Such a novelist was Tolstoy. His fiction is as powerful as is the art of the Pre-Raphaelites. It is all sincerity. Nothing escapes him. What the X-Ray does in the physical world that his penetrating eye does in the field of morals. He sees the sin through a thousand layers of pretense and hypocrisy, and he describes it as he sees it. Disagreeable as are some of the subjects of which he treats, there is not a line that may not be read without a blush by the pure-minded. Like a surgeon, who cuts into the sore for the purpose of letting out the poison, he lays bare the wrongs and rottenness of church and government for the purpose of affecting the needed cure. As a prophet he speaks the language of prophets. As a reformer he tells the truth as reformers tell it, unvarnished and ungarnished. He spares others as little as he spared himself in his book "_My Confession_." He wants others to do as he has done, to subject the lusts and appetites and greeds to the rule of conscience, if the kingdom of God is ever to be established on earth.

Opposed by government.

Radical in his reform propositions from the first, he attracted attention at once. The world was amazed at the daring of his thought and at the plainness of his speech, and hailed him as a new prophet. The government, however, looked upon him as a revolutionist, and gave him clearly to understand that he would be silenced if he did not change his views and style of writing. Instead of complying with its wish, he became all the more daring in thought and all the plainer in speech. The humblest peasant could understand as clearly as the shrewdest diplomat what he was after. And it was not long before the government was after him. The publication and sale of certain of his books were prohibited. They were read all the more outside of Russia, and by the thousands of copies within Russia. And the more they were read the larger loomed his world-fame, till he became too large for banishment or prison, for fortress or Siberian mine.

Challenged government
to do its worst.

With all the fiery zeal of an ancient Jewish prophet, he challenged the government to do its worst, "to tighten the well-soaped noose about his throat" as it tightened it about the throats of thousands of better men than any that are in the service of the autocrat or of his hirelings, the bureaucrats. Theirs was a government, he said, by might not by right, by gallows and knout, not by law.

His political demands.

He demanded the abolition of the throne and of capital punishment, the disbanding of the army, and the discontinuance of trial by court-martial. He demanded liberty of speech and freedom of conscience. He demanded the surrender to the people of lands and rights that justly belonged to them, and scathingly he denounced those who wasted in riotousness what had been painfully gotten together with the heart's blood of the laboring-people. He denounced the government for its cruelty toward the Jews, and charged it with having instigated the massacres of them. He held the government responsible for every misfortune that befell the country--war, famine, pestilence, intense poverty, hopeless misery, appalling ignorance. In burning words he charged the slaughter of tens of thousands of husbands and fathers and sons, in the Japanese war, to the greed of the mighty. He depicted the Duma as the laughing stock of the world, as composed of people so stupid as not even to recognize what fools they were making of themselves. In his "_Resurrection_" he held up to the view of the world Russia's courts of law, and her iniquitous prison-system, the blocking of justice, the shocking judicial indifference and laxities in cases involving life-long sentences to penal servitude, the "lives that are shed like water upon the ground" during the transport to Siberia, and the crimes and rebellions that are systematically bred by such crying injustice.

Little wonder that the government had no love for Tolstoy, and that it suppressed publication after publication of his, and maintained a special corps of censors and spies to watch him. Little wonder that it prohibited demonstrations of sorrow at the announcement of his death, and made use of the church as a cat's paw for holding him up as the Anti-Christ, and arch-fiend, as the enemy of the Czar, Church and people.[2]

[2] See his essay "_Church and State_."

His demands of the
people.

Plain and fearless as was his speech to the government it was yet more so to the people. Not a wrong in society, public or private, which he did not know, and which he did not castigate as only he knew how to castigate. Louder and louder, as he grew older, he preached the Law of God against the law of degenerate society. Art and science, commerce and industry were to him as nothing in comparison with the Moral Law, without which he saw no future for mankind.

His views respecting
marriage and society.

The sanctity of the marriage tie, the sobriety and industry of the husband, the domesticity of the wife, were among the most constant of his themes. He loathed the self-exhibiting society woman; in his eyes she was no better than the street-woman. Great to him was the womanly woman, greater the domestic wife, greatest of all the mother, and so many more times greater the more times she was mother.[3]

[3] See his essays "_Man and Woman, Their Respective
Functions_;" and "_The Mother_," and his book "_What To Do?_"

His views respecting
labor and capital.

The sad lot of the poor and the riotous extravagances of the rich were constantly recurrent subjects of discussion with him. "We speak of the abolition of slavery," said he, "but we have abolished only the word, the poor are enslaved as much as ever. We need a new emancipation, the emancipation of the rich from the tyranny of their money, from the thraldom of the false view of themselves and of society. With what right do men speak of the abolition of slavery, when every time they look into the mirror they see a slave-driver, when they live in idleness, and fatten on the heart's blood of the down-trodden, when they indulge their stomachs with the choicest of dainties, and wrap their bodies in silks and broad cloths and furs, while those, whose slavish toil provides these luxuries and comforts, have not enough food to keep body and soul together, nor enough of raiment and shelter to keep from freezing?"

In an article, published a few years ago in the _North American Review_, Tolstoy spoke of a group of peasants standing aside to let a picknicking party of rich folks drive by. One of the ladies' hats "has cost more than the horse with which the peasant plows the field," and for the gentleman's riding stick has been paid a week's wages of an underground workman. "Everywhere, two or three men in a thousand live so that, doing nothing for themselves, they eat and drink in one week what would have fed hundreds for a year; they wear garments costing thousands of dollars; they live in palaces, where thousands of workmen could have been housed; and they spend upon their caprices the fruits of thousands and tens of thousands of working days. The others, sleepless and unfed, labor beyond their strength, ruining their moral and physical health for the benefit of these few chosen ones." It is natural that the rich should not object to this arrangement, said he, the surprising thing is that the poor take it so complacently. "Why do all these men, strong in physical vigor, and in the habit of labor--the enormous majority of humanity--why do they submit to and obey a handful of feeble men, generally incapable of anything?" Tolstoy finds the answer very simple. It is because the minority have money, and the workingmen need the money to feed their families. Millions of workingmen submit "because one man has usurped the factory, another the land, and a third the taxes collected from the workmen." Were the millions, who now slave for the rich, to get their food from the soil, the rich, to keep alive, would be obliged to raise their own food, and the double redemption would have begun. It is because the number of workers who produce the prime necessities of life is diminishing that the number of those who use luxuries is increasing. Under such conditions, the health of society, wrote he, is as little possible as is the health of that person, whose body is continually growing heavier in weight, and his legs are continually growing thinner and weaker. When the support vanishes the body must fall.[4]

[4] See also his book "_What To Do?_" and his essay "_The
Russian Revolution_."

His Remedy.

As a bitter opponent of violent measures, he saw but one way for righting the wrongs of society, and that is in the well-to-do descending to the lowly and starting life anew with them on a common level, and rising with them step by step to the higher planes. And to prevent a relapse to the old iniquitous state, he advocated the eradication of capital, which he held responsible for many of the inequalities and tyrannies and miseries of society. Let the rich, said he, convert their money into land and parcel it out among the poor, and claim for themselves no more than an equal share with the others. Merely wishing the poor well, and yet continuing the old state of affairs, is like sitting on a man's neck and crushing him down, yet all the time assuring him and others that we are sorry for him, and wish to ease his condition by every means in our power except by getting off his back. Or it is like entering an orchard, and barring the door behind, and gathering its fruit for ourselves, and wishing others might have as much yet continuing to keep the door barred and gathering for ourselves alone.[5]

[5] See his book "_What To Do?_" and his essay "_Money_."

If we really wish to see the lot of the poor improved, said he, we must not look for a miracle to effect it nor trust to some future age to bring it about. We must do it ourselves, and we must do it now. And we must do it at the cost of self-sacrifice. If people really wish to improve the condition of their brother men, and not merely their own, they must be ready not only to alter the way of life to which they are accustomed, but they must be ready for an intense struggle with themselves and their families.[6]

[6] "_The Slavery of Our Times._"

Society will never be at peace, said he, until man will have learned the service of sacrifice. And man will never be happy until he will have learned to find his happiness in making others happy.[7]

[7] "_Cossacks._" "_Christ's Christianity._"

My Visit to Tolstoy

(_Concluded._)

A DISCOURSE, AT TEMPLE KENESETH ISRAEL,
BY
RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D.

Philadelphia, January 8th, 1911.

Tolstoy's fatal
flight.

The world was amazed, a few weeks ago, at the news that Tolstoy had fled from his family and home, with the resolve to retire to some wilderness, there to await his end. Guesses as to the cause were many, and the opinion was quite general that extreme old age had affected his reason.

Explained in light of
last article of his.

I could not subscribe to this conclusion, neither could I see anything strange in his sudden departure. I knew of a number of similar flights in his life, and the reasons for them, and, therefore, I was little surprised. And as to suspecting him of failing mentality, I had but a short time before read the latest of his writings, entitled "_Three Days in a Village_," in which I had seen no sign of a lessening of his power of mind and heart and soul. And it is obvious that the Russian government, likewise, saw no lessening of his mentality, for it promptly suppressed the publication of it. An enterprising newspaper man, however, succeeded in forwarding a copy to our country, which enterprise not only rescued for us the last of Tolstoy's writings but also furnished us an explanation of his sudden and fatal flight.

Divided into three
parts.

The article, a comparatively short one, was divided into three parts, each a heart-rending recital of miseries in villages neighboring the count's estate.

First part described
peasant poverty.

The first part deals with wayfaring men. From six to twelve of them visit these villages daily in search of bread and clothes, of work and shelter. Some are blind or lame, some sick or feeble, some are very old or very young, some are maimed or crippled, dragging with them hideous memories of the recent Japanese war. Many of them are ignorant and filthy, but some of them are intelligent and revolutionary, who look upon the prosperous as thieves, and ask for their share of the coined blood pressed from the hearts of the poor and down-trodden. To keep these unceasing streams of wayfaring paupers from becoming a government charge, they are parcelled out by the authorities among the poor and helpless peasantry, good care being taken that they are not loaded upon the landlords, merchants or priests. The wickedness of this course is fully intelligible only to those who have some conception of the indescribable poverty and misery of Russian peasants. Stripped of almost all by taxation and by landlord oppression and by priest and constable extortion, many of them have scarcely food and room enough for themselves and cattle, scarcely clothes enough to cover their nakedness, no money with which to buy the absolutely necessary farming-implements, or to keep their wretched hovels from toppling over their heads. And yet, notwithstanding their appalling misery, Tolstoy saw their hearts go out in pity to these wandering paupers, and religiously dividing their crust with those yet more unfortunate than they, not knowing how soon they themselves might be in a similarly wretched plight.

Second part described
peasant misery.

The second part of the article bears the sub-title "_Living and Dying_." Upon entering the village accompanied by his physician, the count was entreated for aid by a woman. Upon inquiry he learned that her husband had been drafted into the army, and that the family was starving. Upon asking the village authority why the law had been violated in taking from a family its sole supporter, he was told that the husband's brother was quite capable of supporting the family. Next he met a little orphan girl twelve years old, who was the head of a family of five children. Her father had been killed in a mine; her mother had dropped dead from exhaustion, a few weeks after; poor but kind-hearted neighbors kept their eyes on the children, whilst the oldest went about begging the means for their support. In another hovel he found a man in his death-throes with pneumonia. The room was damp and cold; there was no fuel for the stove; no food, no medicine, no mattress, no pillow, for the dying man.

Contrasted with
extravagance in his
own family.

Saddened by what he had seen and heard the count drove home. In front of his house he saw a carpeted sleigh, drawn by magnificent horses, driven by a coachman attired in heavy fur-coat and cap. It was the conveyance of the count's son, who had come on a visit to his father. There were ten at the table, who partook of a dinner of four courses, spiced by two kinds of wine. Two butlers were in attendance, and costly flowers were on the table. "Whence came these orchids?" asked the son, to which the mother replied that they had come all the way from St. Petersburg. "They cost a ruble and a half a piece," said the son, adding that at a recent concert the whole stage was smothered with orchids. Another at the table talked of a little recreation trip to Italy, but thought it troublesome to be obliged to spend thirty-nine hours in an express train, and regretted that aviation had not proceeded far enough to make possible a trip to Italy in shorter time. The count contrasted these table sights and sounds with those he had seen and heard in the village in the course of the day, and he left the table even sadder than he was when he came to it.

Third part described
peasant oppression.

The third part of the article deals with the taxation of the villagers. From one old peasant the tax collectors took his samovar--the brass kettle for making tea--as indispensable to a Russian as a stove is to us. From another, a widow, they took a sheep; from another they took a cow, and so on. One poor woman offered him some linen at the price of two rubles, the amount she needed for taxes, saying that, if she failed to make the sale, they will seize not only the linen but also her chickens, her only means of support. That women play so large a part in these taxations is due to so many of the men having been killed in the Japanese war, or serving in the army. Upon remonstrating with the village authorities, he was told that they were sorry for the poor people, but helpless, that they had received instructions from headquarters to be unsparing in the discharge of their duty. Upon visiting the district chief he was made clearly to recognize that back of his severity lay his ambition for promotion as a reliable, immovable government official.

Felt that all his
labors had been in
vain.

Little wonder, that the government suppressed the publication of this last of Tolstoy's writings. Little wonder, that the three days spent amid the miseries of the villagers saddened his heart beyond endurance. And still less wonder, that the government's responsibility for it, and the world's indifference to it, even his own family's, drove him to despair, ripened in him the resolve to retire to some wilderness, where the soul would no longer be harrowed by the sight of human outrages and sufferings.

In the midst of such miseries as he saw, he must have felt that the more than half a century of unceasing labors in behalf of the poor and down-trodden, all his renunciations and sacrifices had all been in vain. He must have felt that the lot of the peasant was as bad as ever, that the government was as cruel as before, that all his writings and all his pleadings for a more equitable division of God's gifts had failed to make the slightest impression upon the people, judging by the extravagances within his own family, seeing four courses of delicacies on his own table, at a single meal, two kinds of wine, costly orchids, when, at but a short distance away, men and women, even children, working infinitely harder than any of his own family, deserving infinitely more than any who lord it over them, were literally starving for the want of the necessities of life, were dying in agony for the want of medical care and ordinary comforts, had their last possession taken from them by pitiless tax-collectors for the support of a vast army of soldiers and officials, for the maintenance of a costly and an oppressive autocracy.

Noted his discontent
when in conversation
with him.

Even as far back as 1894, when he was sixteen years younger than he was at the time of his flight, even then I noted in my conversations with him an undercurrent of deep sorrow when dwelling on the sufferings of the people, an occasional outburst of impatience at the slowness of progress, and now and then a cry of despair, an utter hopelessness of ever seeing a state of society different from what it was.

Those responsible for
wrongs charged him
with irreligion.

What seemed to vex him most was seeing the very people who were responsible for these wrongs and outrages considering themselves religious, and branding as infamous such a man as he whose sole cry was for justice and right. "Because they mumble so many prayers a day," said he to me, when speaking of Pobdiedonostzief, "and cross themselves so many times, and fast so many days in the year, they consider themselves Christian, as for the rest of their conduct, one finds it difficult to believe that they had ever heard of the _Sermon on the Mount_, of the _Golden Rule_ or of the _Mosaic command" "Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself."_ Asking me for an explanation of Reform Judaism, and telling him that is was founded upon an emphasis on the spirit of religion rather than on its forms, he replied that it would not be tolerated in Russia, that the mere words Reform and Spirit were quite sufficient to condemn it. The government knows that they who seek the Spirit also seek the Truth, and it is afraid that Truth will overthrow autocracy and hierarchy, blind obedience and stupid ceremony, and will set men free.

Few men had studied
religion as much as
he.

There are many things in connection with Tolstoy which Russia of the future will wish to see expunged from the pages of its history, and chief of these will be its having branded him as infamously irreligious. Few men have been as genuinely religious as he. Few men have given religion as much thought as he. Few men have written on religious subjects as much as he.

Rebelled against
adulteration of
religion.

He studied the Scriptures in the original languages, and carefully he read Church doctrine and dogmatic theology, and the more he read the firmer became his conviction that _Christ's Christianity_ was quite a different thing from _Church Christianity_. He rejected the latter, and fervently he espoused the former. Three-fourth of what passes for Christianity, he said, has no historical nor logical nor spiritual warrant. He saw how its fundamental principle, the equality of all men as sons of God, had been perverted to give the classes the right to enslave the masses. He saw how a divine being had been made of Jesus, and how this enabled the church to say that living the life he lived, and practicing the precepts he preached was impossible for human beings. He had read in the Scriptures not to resist evil, and yet had been taught the soldier's trade, the art of killing. The army to which he had belonged was called "The Christophile Army," and it was sent forth with a Christian benediction. One day, he said, he was reading in Hebrew, with a Rabbi, the fifth chapter of Matthew. After nearly every verse the Rabbi said "This is in the Old Testament or in the Talmud," and showed me the corresponding passages. When we reached the words "Resist no evil," the Rabbi did not say "This is in the Talmud," but he asked "Do the Christians obey this command? Do they turn the other cheek?" "I had nothing to say in reply," said Tolstoy, "for at that particular time, Christians, far from turning the other cheek, were smiting the Jews upon both cheeks. I saw the support the church gave to persecutions and to the death penalty, and my soul cried out against it."

And his mind rebelled, he said and wrote, against the mythology which was paraded as theology, such teachings as the immaculate conception, the heaven opening and the angels singing, Christ's flying through the air and into the sky, and seating himself at the right hand of God. He denounced as blasphemous such teachings as that by partaking of the Sacrament God's body becomes assimilated with that of man, or that of God being three Gods in one, being still angry at man for the sin of Adam, and sending His only son on earth to be crucified so that by the son's blood the father's wrath may be appeased. He regarded as unworthy even of heathens such teachings as that salvation for sin depended on being baptized, and that God will visit eternal punishment on those who do not believe in His divinely begotten son. He professed a sincere belief in God as the author of all existence, and as the source of all love. He believed that death meant a new and higher birth. He believed that God's will was most clearly expressed in the teachings of the man Jesus, whom to consider and pray to as God he regarded as blasphemous.

Compressed
religion into five
commandments.

He compressed the teachings of Jesus into the following commandments: I. "Do not be angry. II. Do not lust. III. Do not give away the control of your future actions by taking oaths. IV. Do not resist evil. V. Do not withhold love from any one." These five commandments he developed into a comprehensive moral philosophy, and by it he conscientiously endeavored to guide his life and thought.[8]

[8] See his books "_My Confession_," "_My Religion_," and Aylmer
Maude's _The Life of Tolstoy_.

Was indebted for his
faith to peasants.

And for that strong and simple faith of his, which is destined, in the not distant future, to inaugurate an era in the religious world similar to that which Luther inaugurated four centuries earlier in Germany, he was indebted to the peasants. During the libertine life of his early years, he had lost the little faith that had been taught him in his childhood. He had returned to his estate an avowed atheist, and as such had he continued for some time, until, one day, he inquired into what it was that made the wretchedly poor and ignorant and hard-working peasants contented with their lot, resigned to their fate, bearing hardships and sufferings unmurmuringly, and looking happily forward to the end. He found it in their faith. "Surely," said he, "a state of mind that can do so much for the poor is worth having by all." And he devoted himself to a diligent study of their religion. He found it burdened with foreign accretions, contaminated with a putrid mass that had been gathered during centuries of darkness and superstition, adulterated with all kinds of conscious and unconscious inventions. Stripping away the foreign and putrid and false, he alighted upon a rational, satisfying faith, the faith which he believed to have been that of the Rabbi of Nazareth, and, henceforth, consecrated his life to the propagation of it.

Gave them his life
and labor in return.

And more yet than what the peasants gave to him he gave to them in return. He gave them himself, and, in the end, he sacrificed even his life for them. He found them down-trodden serfs, he endeavored to make free men of them. He found them cowed and bowed, he taught them to walk and stand erect. He found them unbefriended, he became a brother to them. He found them wretchedly poor, he renounced pleasure and treasure, luxury and ease, to lessen as much as he could the distance between them and himself. He dressed as they dressed, and labored as they labored, and, as far as permitted, ate the kind of food they ate. He found them stalking in darkness, he brightened their way for them. He found them ignorant and at the mercy of priest and government official, he became their advocate, dared to brave an all-powerful autocracy in the defense of their rights. He started schools for them. He gave up writing for the thousands of select readers that he might write for the millions of illiterate peasants and other laborers. He wrote special booklets for them, and sold them at a loss, at one-half cent a copy, stories, legends, symbolical tales, moral plays and religious tracts, all fitted for their minds and stations, and intended to deepen in them the law of love and right.

Died believing he had
failed.

To have sacrificed and renounced and dared as much and as long as he had, and, in the end, to find what he found, in his three days observation of village miseries and outrages, was more than his great heart could stand. It broke. He was eighty-two years old. He could no longer continue the fight. He could no longer look upon the suffering of the unfortunates, nor upon the wrongs of the world, nor upon the extravagances even within his own family. He regarded his whole life-work a dismal failure. He knew of no other balm for his bleeding heart than flight from the world to some secluded spot, there, as a hermit, to await the end, which he knew was not far distant. Truly pathetic were his farewell lines to his wife:

"I cannot continue longer to live a life of ease and luxury while
others starve and suffer. Like many other old men, I retire from the
world to await my end in solitude. I ask that you do not seek my
place of sojourn, and that you do not come to it if it be discovered.
I beg forgiveness for the grief that I may cause you."

Characteristic of
great reformers.

He was not the first of the world's great reformers and lovers of humanity to lose heart and to experience spells of despair. Moses and Elijah and Jesus and others had their hours of agony, and prayed that the end might come, and deliver them from their hopeless labors. And many who, like Tolstoy, closed their eyes in the belief that they had utterly failed loomed large in subsequent ages among the greatest of the world's benefactors.

Succeeded better than
he knew.

Tolstoy has not failed. He succeeded better than he knew. His pathetic death revealed the vast number of followers he had in his own country and in all parts of the world. And had he cared to inquire, he might have known it before his death. He could have seen it from the fact that more books of his were sold than of all other Russian authors combined. He could have seen it in the vast crowds that gathered all along the line, to catch a glimpse of him, when on his journey, a few years ago, to the Crimea, in search of health. He could have seen it in the deputations of sympathizers that waited upon him, and in the streams of congratulatory letters and telegrams that rushed in upon him--till suppressed--after his excommunication. He could have seen it in the Tolstoyan societies among the students of almost all the Russian universities and among other bodies. He could have seen it among the considerable number of landlords, who made conscientious efforts at following his life, and at adopting his mode of dealing with peasants and laborers. Were the yoke of autocracy removed, there would arise in Russia an army of Tolstoyans as vast and mighty as the host which Ezekiel in his vision saw in the valley of dry bones.

Religion of future
will be largely
Tolstoyan.

The religion of Russia of the future will be largely that which Tolstoy lived and taught, and it will be the religion of a large part of the rest of the world. Time's sifting process will eliminate whatever is untenable in his system of moral and social and economic philosophy, which sprang more from a flaming heart than from a cool, calculating mind. He had neither the time nor the inclination to work out a synthetic philosophy. He wrote as the spirit moved him, and whenever it moved him, the keynote of all his writing having been, as he said to me, "the hastening of the day when men will dwell together in the bonds of love, and sin and suffering will be no more."

There are in the Tolstoyan system of religion the elements of the long-dreamed of universal creed. It will take time for the rooting of it. Mormonism and Dowieism spring up, like Jonah's gourd, and pass away as speedily as they came. A system as rational and radical as that of Tolstoy requires an age for germination. But, once it takes root, it takes root forever; once it blossoms, it blossoms for eternity.

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