Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/166

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THOUGHTS ON GOD
25

This comes of people being so certain that what they do wrongly is not only good but excellent — as when they affirm that to give all one's love to one's children is very good. Then, when they experience the evil which is only the result of their own mistakes, their own sins, they blame, not themselves, but God. And therefore, in the depth of their soul, they acknowledge God to be evil, that is, deny Him, and therefore do not receive consolation from Him.

.....

It is into God one must penetrate. There only can one unite with others.

.....

The moral law, being founded on phenomena of life, will always be local, temporary, casual, and, above all, doubtful. Whatsoever general reasons may be put forward, why I should act thus and not otherwise in this indefinite universe, I will always find, or will feel, the existence of other yet more general reasons which will overthrow the demands put before me ; and so on to infinity.

And therefore no temporary law, not founded upon the relation to the infinite, can ever be certain. Only such a relation to the universe, or to the mind of the universe, to God, from which flows a certain continual direc-