Philosophy tell us that we must go on living as we are, in the firm belief that, according to the law of historical progress, after living for a long time badly, our life will right itself and suddenly become good of its own accord.” We all know how the crisis ended. We all know how Tolstoi found peace at last by resolutely devoting his whole life to labouring for the people in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. “Live according to faith, and faith will come to you,” was his eureka. His eccentric, arbitrary, and—there is really no other word for it—his absurd mutilation of Scripture, which he was forced to recast in order to make it fit in with his own very peculiar version of the Gospels (as to which by the ⟨way he⟩ dogmatizes every whit as magisterially as the church which he so hastily disparaged and which was finally driven to condemn him), are too well known to be alluded to here. But however we may deplore Tolstoi’s provocative method of biblical interpretation, we cannot but reverence the sublime unselfishness of the life he has led ever since what we may perbaps call his conversion. From 1881 to the ⟨present time⟩ he has literally devoted himself, body ⟨and⟩ soul, to the service of his poorer brethren, the Russian muzhiks, for whom he has always had an intense sympathy and admiration. He has done this in two ways, by working among them and by writing for them. He had always been of the opinion that “the only really honest labour worthy of a man was manual labour,” and from henceforth he adopted the life of a common peasant, and worked vigorously alongside his labourers in his own fields.
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