Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/252

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236
EESSAYS AND LETTERS


petrates and maintains this fraud, and by means of it retains power.

And, therefore, the sole way to free people from their many miseries lies in freeing them from the false faith instilled into them by the Government, and in them imbibing the true Christian teaching, which this false teaching hides. The true Christian teaching is very simple, clear, and obvious to all, as Christ said. But it is simple and accessible only when man is freed from that falsehood in which we were all educated, and which is passed off upon us as God's 'Truth.

Nothing useful can be poured into a vessel that is already full of what is useless. Ve must first empty out what is useless. So it is with the acquirement of true Christian teaching. We have first to understand that all the stories telling how God made the world 6,000 years ago ; how Adam sinned and the human race fell, and how the Son of God (a God born of a virgin) came on earth and redeemed man ; and all the fables in the Old Testament and in tlie Gospels, and all the lives of the saints with their stories of miracles and relics — are all nothing but a gross hash of Jewish super- stitions and priestly frauds. Only to a man quite free from this deception can the clear and simple teaching of Christ, which needs no explanation, be accessible and comprehensible. That teaching tells us nothing of the beginning, or of the end, of the world, nor about God and His purpose, nor, in general, about things which we cannot and need not know ; but it speaks only of what man must do to save himself — that is, how best to live the life he has come into, in this world, from birth to death. For that purpose it is only necessary to act towards others as we wish them to act towards us. In that is all the law and the prophets, as Christ said. And to act in this way we need neither icons, nor relics, nor church services, nor priests, nor catechisms, nor Governments, but, on the contrary, we need perfect '"reedom from all that ; for to do to others as we wish them to do to us is only possible when a man is free from the fables which the priests give out as the only