they can follow: they are not sufficiently alive. Tolstoy did not belong to the self-satisfied elect; he was of no Church; of no sect; he was no more a Scribe, to borrow his terms, than a Pharisee of this faith or that. He was the highest type of the free Christian, who strives all his life long towards an ideal that is always more remote.[1]
Tolstoy does not speak to the privileged, the enfranchised of the world of thought; he speaks to ordinary men—hominibus bonae voluntatis. He is our conscience. He says what we all think, we average people, and what we all fear to read in ourselves. He is not a master full of pride: one of those haughty geniuses who are throned above humanity upon their art and their intelligence. He is—as he loved to style himself in his letters, by that most beautiful of titles, the most pleasant of all—“our brother.”
- ↑ “A Christian should not think whether he is morally superior or inferior to others; but he is the better Christian as he travels more rapidly along the road to perfection, whatever may be his position upon it at any particular moment. Thus the stationary virtue of the Pharisee is less Christian than that of the thief, whose soul is moving rapidly towards the ideal, and who repents upon his cross.” (Cruel Pleasures.)
