WHAT IS RELIGION? 315
hide underlying- contradictions, complex, subtle dis- quisitions are piled up, which, by filling the mind with all sorts of unnecessary rubbish, divert men^s attention from what is important and essential, and make it pos- sible for them to petrify in the deceit in which, without noticing it, the people of our world are living.
' Men loved the darkness rather than the light ; for their works were evil,' says the Gospel. ^ For every one that doeth ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved.^
And therefore the men of our world, ha'ing, in consequence of their lack of religion, arranged a most cruel, animal, and immoral life, have also brought their complex, subtle, unprofitable activity of mind — hiding the evil of this kind of life — to such a degree of unnecessary intricacy and confusion, that the majority of them have quite lost the capacity to distinguish good from evil, or what is false from what is true.
There is not a single question the men of our world can approach directly and simply : all questions — economic, national, political (whether home or foreign), diplomatic or scientific, not to mention questions of philosophy and religion — are presented so artificially and incorrectly, and are swathed in such thick shrouds of complex, unnecessary disputations — such subtle per- versions of meanings and words, such sophistries and disputes — that all arguments about such questions revolve on one spot, connected with nothing, and, like driving-wheels without a connecting strap, efifect nothing except tlie one object for which they were pro- duced : to hide from one's self and from others the evil in which men live and the evil they commit.
In every domain of what is now called science, one and the same feature is encountered, baffling the mental efforts men direct to the investigation of various domains of knowledge. This feature is, that all these scientific investigations evade the essential question calling for
