. L ■^-W'if^Hil OF TOLSTOY I UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 3 1822 02661 0667 rnia 1 r^'~^ — \ LIBRARN UNrVEftSITY or CALIFORNIA . SAN DIEeO 1 UNIVERSITY OF r.Ai iFORNia <-iN niFGO 3 1822 02661 0667 Social Sciences & Humanities Library University of California, San Diego Please Note: This item is subject to recall. Date Due /"a :7 JUN ;{ 1999 CI 39 (5/97) UCSD Lib. THE RELIGION AND ETHICS OF TOLSTOY BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE RELIGION OF H. Q. WELLS AND OTHER ES5AYS Cr. 8vo, cloth. 3s. 6d. net Contents. — The Religion of H. G. Wells — The Alleged Indifference of Laymen to Religion — Christ's Remedy for Fear : A Defence of the Higher Anthropomorphism in Religion — The Plenteous Harvest and the Scarcity of True Labourers — Some Thoughts on The Scarlet Letter-. "While — as it seems to us — it does justice to Mr Wells, it affords also a powerful and thoroughly modern defence of a rational Christianity." — Inquirer. " An earnest and ingenious effort to discover how far the views of the novelist approximate to those of the Christian philosopher ... As intellectual exercises, the book's whole contents will appeal to thinking men and women." — Globe. "His examination of Mr H. G. Wells's i^/Vi/ and Last Things is an excellent piece of critical exposition, and discovers the weak points of that interesting, if somewhat impetuous, "confession of faith," particularly in regard to Mr Wells's estimate of Jesus." — Literary World. " The analysis is well done . . . His criticism, too, is acute and cogent." — Christian Commonwealth. "Extremely readable and full of the widest human interest." — Manchester City News. London: T. FISHER UNWIN. THE RELIGION AND ETHICS OF TOLSTOY BY THE Rev. ALEXANDER H. CRAUFURD, M.A., {Formerly Exhibitioner of Oriel College^ Oxford) AUTHOR OF "recollections OP JAMES MARTINEAU," "THE RELIGION OF H. O. WELLS, ANM> OTHER ESSAYS," ETC. T. FISHER UNWIN LONDON : ADELPHI TERRACE LEIPSIC : INSELSTRASSE 20 1912 [^// Rights Reserved] CONTENTS Introduction ix I. The Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy . 17 II. The Personality of God . . . 155 III. Tolstoy's Melancholy and Hopefulness 169 IV. Tolstoy's Views on Art . . . 177 VI 1 // INTEODUCTION Count Leo Nikolaevitch Tolstoy was born in the early autumn of the year 1828 at Yasnaya Poly ana, near Moscow. His parents both be- longed to the Russian aristocracy. His father had been in the army. His childhood was not altogether happy on account of his extremely sensi- tive and passionate temperament. He was an ideahst even in his youth. Even then he had a great longing for God, and he appears even then to have studied some of the greatest problems of life and thought. At a very early age he was a student at the university of Kazan, and afterwards he was a student in the university of St Petersburg. In the year 1851 he was for a time an officer in the Caucasus, and he was greatly dehghted with the mountains of that district, and was profoundly and permanently impressed by them. He re- mained in the Caucasus till the year 1853. In the ix Introduction year 1854 we find him in active service as an officer in the Crimean War. During that war he dis- tinguished himself by his great bravery, and he saw much of the horrors of war. They left on his mind an abiding sense of the utter hatefulness of war. In the hospitals he saw scenes which pierced and sickened his heart, so that he became a fervent and persistent advocate of peace. At the close of the Crimean War, Tolstoy left the army and took to society and Hterature, and he also travelled a good deal. In the early autumn of 1862 he was married. And then for many years he lived at his country house, Yasnaya Polyana, and spent his time in looking after his estates and in writing. In the year 1878 he experienced what is called his conversion ; and from that time till his death his main interest was in religion. Before his conversion he suffered agonies of spiritual un- rest, and he very often thought of committing suicide. Neither science nor philosophy could satisfy him. His condition at this stage reminds one of that of St Augustine during a similar time of crisis. Both these great souls thirsted for God, Introduction and could not be satisfied with anything else. Tolstoy does not really tell us exactly how he eventually found peace. So far as he indicates the process at all, it seems to have consisted in a sudden conviction that Christ's teaching, contained in the Sermon on the Mount, was to be apphed literally to every phase of human life. Hence- forth he hved only for the propagation of the Gospel which he had discovered. He cast himself adrift from the churches, and thought out a re- hgion for himself. He came to the conclusion that simple people, like the peasants, really understood the philosophy of hfe far better than the rich and the cultivated. As Emerson would have said concerning them, these intellectual babes were " wiser than they knew." enuring the later years of his life Tolstoy's re- ligion was a kind of mixture of Sociahsm, asceti- cism, and mysticism, with a sHght tincture of stoicismy He wished to have no property of his own; but he was obhged to be content vnth. making over his possessions to his family. Personally he hved a hfe of extreme simphcity, and he abhorred xi Introduction all luxuries. He even condemned the habit of smoking. His novels, as everyone knows, acquired a world-wide fame, and they helped to induce a considerable number of people to study his ethical and religious books. He has exercised more influ- ence over the world in general than any other Russian has ever exercised. He has directed men's attention to some extremely important, though generally neglected, aspects of the religion of Christ. He has transported that religion from the academies of the learned and the cathedrals of formal worship into the market-places of ordinary life. He has constantly kept in his mind the declaration of the Bible, that the common people heard Christ gladly. This great teacher has given us an ideal towards which all true followers of Jesus ought to work. He has woke us up from the deep slumber of self- satisfied and Pharisaical conventionalism. He has forced many of us to reaUze the truth that ordinary ecclesiasticism is not the Christianity of Christ. From the vain wrangHng of dogmatic xii Introduction theologians he has led us back to the fountain- head of practical goodness. He has made us think more of the Sermon on the Mount and less of the Athanasian creed. The object of this httle book is to discuss the rehgion of Tolstoy in a spirit of sympathy com- bined with careful criticism, and also to compare his ethical and spiritual ideas with those of other well-known thinkers. The death of this famous Russian occurred so very recently — only a few weeks ago — that it is scarcely necessary to give readers an account of it. His wandering from his home appears to have been the culmination of a long-cherished tendency to seek a sort of monastic seclusion in which he might meditate over the lessons of his life, and prepare his soul for its migration to an unearthly condition beyond time and space. Ut March 1911. xiu THE RELIGION AND ETHICS OF TOLSTOY The Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Count Leo Tolstoy's extraordinary genius as an artist and a novelist has perhaps tended to hide from us his great merits and value as a religious teacher. Yet many of the very same quaUties which made him such a vivid and brilUant writer of fiction also made him a great etliical and spiritual guide. There was a real and vital con- nection between his art and his rehgion. The latter was not in any sense an abnegation of the former. His intense sincerity his originaUty, and his amazing knowledge of the secret recesses of the souls of men and women, together with his exceedingly picturesque and imaginative style, are just as valuable in religion as in art or general A 17 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy literature. It is evident enough that in many ways he belonged to the order of the true prophets. His intense spiritual loneUness and his haunting sense of the horrors of death show his abiding kin- ship with spirits like those of the old Hebrew moralists, and of Dante, Pascal, and Cardinal New- man. His greatest novels were a kind of pre- lude to his conversion. Like St Paul, when his eyes were opened to discern the reahties of hfe and death, he conferred not with flesh and blood, but retired to the bleak steppes of Russia, even as the Apostle to the Gentiles retired to the deserts of Arabia. His reHgion was the outcome of personal experience and intuition, and not of any sort of tradition; nor did he approach God through an avenue of books. Hence came the universahty of his message transcending all local hmits. Hence also a certain wildness, as of the desert. He came to men, not as an accredited agent of the churches, but as a kind of stormy and revolutionary Elijah, as a con- queror from the wastes of Edom with garments rolled in blood. A profound melancholy, almost like that of Dante, characterized his teaching as i8 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy to the world and its courses. He had fought with innumerable devastating spiritual beasts or monsters in his solitary vigils. A kind of habitual gloom darkened all his deepest hfe. Tolstoy had also a profound, passionate, and thoroughly unsectarian human tenderness which attracted men far more than the bitter scomful- ness of a Dante or a Carlyle. In him was re- incarnate the noble soul of Bunyan's Greatheart. As his pitying spirit looked forth on the Avelter and chaos of ordinary human hfe, especially as he viewed the dumb, patient, and pathetic endurance of Russianpeasantsand soldiers, this most Christian heart for ever cried, " I have compassion upon the multitude." Tolstoy was a veritable apostle to the heavy-laden, the sorrowful, the down-trodden, and the oppressed. In this respect he greatly re- sembled Theodore Parker, one of the noblest of all souls in modern times, whose large heart was moved to deepest sympathy by the woes of the slaves and outcasts of the world, and of whom the best description ever given was that which de- clared that he always seemed to be holding some- one by the hand. Gazing into the warm recesses 19 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy of Tolstoy's capacious and hospitable heart, one feels that the best description of his spiritual self was given us in the touching and sublime words of an old Hebrew prophet: " A man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." Tolstoy's keen-sighted, invincible, and loving ethical hopefulness is one of our best preservatives against the scornful and depressing pessimism and violence of Carlyle. The hopefulness of the great Russian, unHke the insecure optimism of Emerson, was based on a prolonged and careful study of all the facts of human nature and human Ufe. It never sought to " heal our hurt sHghtly," and to cry peace where there was no peace. This intre- pid warrior spirit had been down into the lowest depths of the universe, and had found God there also, and had seen death and hell swallowed up in the final victory of reason and love. To a sym- pathetic soul living in Russia this glorious moral confidence must have been specially difficult. Even the most faint and shadowy outUnes of a coming kingdom of God were scarcely perceptible 20 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy there. Noble minds there " looked for judgment, and behold oppression, for righteousness, and behold a cry! " Tolstoy knew well some of the very worst hells on earth, the Russian prisons with all their infernal cruelties. Yet his faith remained invincible, as Browning's did when he gazed on the dead bodies of men who had committed suicide. He certainly " came out strong " in the most unfavourable circumstances. Even the exaggerations of this writer are sug- gestive and stimulating. His rehgion was in- tensely spiritual, like that of the best German mystical writers. His whole soul was ever haunted by that most significant and pregnant of all the sayings of Jesus : " The Kingdom of God is within you." From the churches Tolstoy expected httle or nothing of any great value. His estimate of them is despairing, though in great measure just. He thought that they had hidden rather than re- vealed the true teaching of Jesus Christ. They must die, in order that genuine Christianity may live. He wrote thus of them : " The Church carried the hght of the teaching of Jesus for eighteen 21 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy centuries, and, wishing to hide it in her robes, was herself burnt in the flame. The world abandoned her and her institutions for the sake of those very principles of Christianity which she herself had unwilHngly preserved. Those principles live to- day without her. This is a fact which it is now impossible to conceal. . . . All churches, whether CathoKc, Greek, or Protestant, are like sentinels carefully guarding a prisoner who escaped long ago, and who is now a free man attacking them." He also said that the churches have been to man- kind as a helmsman " who did not steer at all." And he goes on to say that this would not signify, except for the fact that men now float on without any rudder or any helmsman, not knowing whither they go. This depreciating estimate of the churches seems true to a very great extent. They appear to have lost touch with the reahties of our pre- sent human hfe. Probably very few men with vivid natures and bold intellects care much, in these days, for ordinary ecclesiastical teaching. Men are now chiefly guided by their instincts to some shght extent enlightened by science and 22 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy philosophy. Conventional preaching appeals mostly to women and woraanirfh men. Before discussing some of Tolstoy's funda- mental ideas, it may be well to compare them with those of other prominent teachers. His affinity to Rousseau is so obvious that we need not point it out . In the first place we find the views of the Russian morahst in complete and violent antagonism with those of that half -mad genius, Nietzsche. Tolstoy in some respects exaggerated Christianity, whereas Nietzsche scorned and abhorred it. The one guide preached humifity, self-sacrifice or self-effacement, and considerate tenderness for the weak; the other preached a gospel of pride, hardness, self- assertion, and tyranny over all the weaker portions of humanity. The Grerman was perfectly wiUing to devour men, if by so doing he could enlarge his own personahty, whilst the Russian ever de- sired to " give his life a ransom for many." Nietz- sche wished to trample upon the weak, just as Cotter Morison wished to exterminate the wicked. Neither of these harsh spirits believed in the re- deeming efficacy of pity and love. Perhaps some very shght germs of Nietzsche's aristocratic self- 23 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy assertiveness may be found in Aristotle's concep- tion of the " high-minded " man in his Ethics. To most thinkers it is plain enough that the religion of Christ and of his follower, Tolstoy, is far wiser and more salutary, as well as far nobler, than that of Nietzsche. But this wiser, more human, and more attractive religion must not be misunderstood or exaggerated, as it often has been in former ages. The duty of self-sacrifice must not be so interpreted as to preclude the best self -de- velopment. Goethe really has something to teach us which we could scarcely learn from Tolstoy. In many cases the very best service which a man can render to his race is to develop himself adequately. In order to serve our fellow-men greatly, we must sometimes decHne to serve them in a slight or trivial way. If one man is to die for the people, it must be in the deepest sense expedient that he should so die. SeM-sacrifice without an adequate object is neither admirable nor desirable. To lay down one's hfe for a friend is noble; but to risk the loss of a valuable human life, in order to save one's neighbour's hat or umbrella, or even his cat or his lap-dog, is decidedly rather foolish. 24 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy To a certain extent it is true that the higher and greater natures ought often to resist the de- mands of the lower. Concentration of aim in Hfe is not selfishness, though it is often confused with it. Those who have real work to do in the world must often refuse to waste their time over trivial matters, such as the tea-parties of women like a " Rosamond Vincy " in Middlemarch. One must, I think, also concede to writers Uke Nietzsche that it is not desirable to encourage the physically and mentally unfit to produce offspring, though of course it is impossible in many cases to prevent them from doing so. We must also own that modern democracy is often dangerous when demanding for the ignorant and stupid an equal share with the wise in determining legislation. An ideal form of govern- ment would be one in which power was in pro- portion to intelhgence. Some modern democracies seem very fooUshly to interpret hterally St Paul's bitterly ironical advice. " Set those to judge who are least esteemed in the Church." It is quite right that the greater natures should exercise real influence over the lower. It is not true that all 25 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy men either are or can be really equal, John Stuart Mill thought that it would be a real dis- advantage to a nation to be given a thoroughly democratic form of government before it was adequately prepared for it. The Vox populi is by no means always a veritable Vox Dei. There is no tyranny so penetrating and injurious as that of an untrained mob. The wise have a right to treat the ignorant as children to a great extent, but they ought to endeavour to educate them gradually, and not merely to suppress or trample upon them, as Nietzsche would do. In his book called Beyond Good and Evil Nietz- sche plainly declared that the higher or greater natures have no duties towards the lower, and that they may treat them just as they please. That assuredly is an intolerable doctrine. Supposing that the inhabitants of some other planet — say Mars — are greatly superior to us, and supposing that free intercourse were established between them and us, would Nietzsche own that these superior and more developed beings had a perfect right to abuse and torture him, if, by so doing, they could promote their own growth? Would 26 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy he say that God has a perfect right to torture His creatures for ever, in order to enhance His own happiness or welfare? Is the saying that Noblesse oblige an entirely false one? Nietzsche's doctrine on this subject seems to be a kind of Calvinism which has discarded the last lingering elements of Christianity. And it is not really in harmony with modem evolutionary ethics, which trace human morality to its primal source in sympathy. It does not seem in the least degree likely that savage selfishness will serve the world better than thoughtful and discriminating benevolence. As James Hinton clearly perceived, the wants and weaknesses of others often give a real significance, interest, and value to the dormant and neglected gifts of higher and stronger natures. We can often do for the sake of others what we could not do from self-regard. Whatever impoverishes our social nature, or narrows the range of its activities, seems necessarily to impoverish our best ethical and spiritual Hfe. In a very real and lasting sense " It is more blessed to give than to receive." The best greatness often comes to us tlirough service to others. 27 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy It appears to be evident enough that the ethical doctrine of Nietzsche is of the sort tersely de- scribed as " penny wise, but pound fooHsh." He does not reahze the profound truth that in the moral and spiritual world lavish giving is often the indispensable condition of still more lavish receiv- ing, that to keep our life is often equivalent to losing it, and that to lose it is often equivalent to the best keeping and enlarging of it. Benefits stolen or violently taken from others are far less precious and valuable than benefits freely given to us. No human fife can thrive without deep and varied sympathy. In discarding self-sacrificing sympathy Nietzsche would wither heroism down to its very roots ; for heroism finds its chief sphere for work amongst the unhappy, the unfortunate, the suffering, the struggling, the oppressed, and the weak. In bearing the burdens of others it finds its own noblest crown of rejoicing. Then only is its love made perfect; then only does it shine with a truly god-hke splendour. In the end, selfishness and unsympathizing tyranny would assuredly bring their own punishment to any spirit which retained any fingering traces of the 28 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy highest human qualities. For such a spirit the glory of hfe would then have departed. There would be almost nothing left to redeem it from the commonplace. In the realms of entirely self- seeking rapacity heroism and love could no longer exist. And, in losing all the finer kinds of heroism, human hfe would cease to be irradiated by the sub- hme. A kind of depressing bhght would brood over man's existence. The son of man would no longer be a son of God. Having devoured or banished or imprisoned all those weaker brethren who afford a sphere for the development or exercise of the noblest quahties of the strong, the vigorous and selfish would find that they had inflicted an irreparable injury on themselves. Their fate would to some extent resemble that of him who wished that everything that he touched should be turned into gold. Their riches would be of very httle value to their owners. Resting amongst the well- stored bams of unscrupulous and violent greediness, the half-stifled inner being of the rich and selfish man might perhaps be eventually startled by the inlierent irony of the universe crying, " Vanitas Vanitatum," or by the voice of the divine wisdom 29 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy saying to him, in a sterner sense than that which its words conveyed in the days of old: "Thou fool, thy soul has already been required of thee. What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? He that keepeth his life shall lose it." Only Love never faileth. The deepest Hfe of the soul cannot truly exist without the heroic and the morally subHme, and these would be effectually banished from a world moulded after Nietzsche's plans. Turning now to a thinker diametrically opposed to Nietzsche, we find in James Hinton a spirit very much akin to that of Tolstoy, as we may also find one in Thomas a Kempis. In their vehement demand for absolute disinterestedness and com- plete self-effacement these three most Christian souls had much in common. Modern altruism bids us say to collective humanity what the author of the Imitation of Christ said to Jesus : " Amem te plus quam me. Ne amem me nisi propter te." It must, I think, be owned that both Tolstoy and Hinton used exaggerated language about seK- sacrifice. They demanded that men should not 30 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy love themselves at all. They remind us of " Dinah Morris," the preacher in Adam Bede, of wliom it was said that, if she had only loved her neighbours as herself, she would have thought that they might very well manage with empty stomachs. Both Tolstoy and Hinton seemed to have a quarrel with personahty as such. The former wished to starve it, whilst the latter wished to destroy it. The Russian morahst sometimes owned that in this life we cannot and ought not to get rid of our individuahty ; but he wished to thrust it entirely into the background, and he sometimes talked of renouncing it as a positive duty. He did not realize the truth that it is unwise to starve or neglect our animal individuality. Asceticism, in its desire to promote spirituality, is very apt to neglect the care of that which is the basis of all fruitful human hfe and activity. It forgets that bodily health is generally an indispen- sable condition of the best and most prolonged mental work. The master must not starve his workmen. Hinton's quarrel \vith consciousness, and to a less extent Tolstoy's disdain of corporeal pleasure, remind one of the far-famed revolt of the 31 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy members against the belly. In both cases alike, that which might seem useless and idle is yet the necessary condition of real activity. And it is manifest that even self-sacrifice implies or postu- lates individuaUty. In order to sacrifice the self, there must be a self — a self perpetually renewed, like the bush that burned but was not consumed. There is no real or essential connection between the most developed self-consciousness and selfish- ness. In being made flesh, the " Word " does not lose its power, but has it greatly increased. Mere abstractions have little influence over the majority of mankind. As Cardinal Newman declared in one of his sermons, personal influence is the best means for propagating truth. Broad and genial humanity is needed in order to attract wandering and erring hearts. Fervent natures often feel towards merely abstract ideas either total indif- ference or else a kind of shrinking and dread, like that which the Israelites felt towards the awful Jehovah when they cried to Moses, " Speak thou with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die." Tolstoy's genuine affinity with Browning is very 32 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy manifest. Both these great souls were radically hopeful, though the temperament of the poet was naturally far more cheerful than that of the Russian noveUst. Both these teachers regarded love as the regnant principle and the goal of the universe. The spirit that pervades the poem called " Paracelsus " also pervades all the writings of Tolstoy, and also gives us an adequate refutation of the doctrines of Nietzsche. Both the novehst and the poet were profound psychologists, but the psychology of Browning was far less influenced by asceticism. The gloom of Russia never invaded the soul of the Englishman. Browning saw far more clearly than Tolstoy the soul of goodness in things evil. He often seemed actually to see what the Russian only dimly hoped for. His mind was far more free from austerity. His spiritual de- velopment had been far less stormy; and so he did not hate sin in that vehement and intolerant way in which those hate it who have been op- pressed and enslaved by it in former years. He never felt the intense reaction and recoil from sensuahty which St Augustine and Tolstoy felt so bitterly. He did not " hate even the garments Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy spotted by the flesh," as Jude would have us hate them. He did not worship virginity or total sexual abstinence. He saw some faint gleams of incipient spirituahty even in some forms of passionate corporeal human affection. In mans animal nature his keen, unprejudiced, and calmer vision descried the promise and the potency of the life heroic. He perceived the extremely subtle way in which good and evil are blended in our wonderfully complex being. To Tolstoy man's animal nature was a mere city of destruction to be immediately and altogether abandoned. To the EngHsh poet that same city was the soil in which there should eventually bloom some of the fairest flowers of the garden of the Lord. Apparently the Russian ascetic, wishing to extirpate animahty entirely, had no vision of the ultimate transfigura- tion of matter by mind. He never learnt that its old grossness is neither an original nor a per- manent quality of matter itseK. Hence, per- haps, arose his vehement repudiation of anything approaching to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In his view of the essential nature of matter Tolstoy had more affinity with Plato 34 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy and the Neo-PIatonists than with Modern Science. It is rather remarkable that in his book called On Life, M'hich contains what we may call his philosophy of religion, Tolstoy did not demand complete sexual abstinence from all men. Prob- ably his asceticism had not yet reached that full and starthng development which confronts us in his Kreutzer Sonata. The world in general is not at all hkely to accept a theory which would bring human existence to a final end in this planet. It is very improbable that God wishes the human race to commit suicide. Such exaggerated teaching is much to be deplored, because it tends to throw discredit on the sanity of the preacher, and so to neutralize much of his wisest adWce. On this, as on some other subjects, we feel incHned to say to the stem ascetic, " Be not righteous over-much; why ehouldest thou destroy thyself? " In some ways Tolstoy had much in common with the American poet, Walt Whitman, though in other ways he was in unrelenting opposition to the views of that erratic thinker. Whitman's glori- fication of the body would have been most revolt- 35 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy ing to Tolstoy; but his distinct preference for what he called natural persons, his liking to associate with peasants, artisans, and simple folk in general, together with his devotion to life in the open air, would have been quite congenial to the Russian moralist who so detested all the artificial- ities of conventional life. As Professor J. R. Seeley truly said, " Conventionalism is in every depart- ment the opposite of reHgion. ' ' We can learn more of fundamental human nature and of its wants and tendencies by intimate converse with soldiers, sailors, labourers, and shepherds than we could learn at the tea-parties of ordinary civilized society. With regard to the eternal and waylaying problem of pain and suffering, the teaching of Tol- stoy is suggestive, though of course not entirely satisfactory. In his profound and brooding mel- ancholy he rather exaggerated the incurable misery of all developed human life, whilst perhaps rather unduly under-estimating the suffering of children and animals. In his book on Life he says, " With the animal and the child pain is clearly defined and very sHght, never attaining to the degree of tor- 36 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy ment which it reaches in a being endowed with reasonable consciousness." He rightly thought that some degree of pain is necessary for the pre- servation of life. He declares that " without the faculty of feehng pain, children and young people would destroy their bodies; grown men would never know the errors of other men of the past or present, nor, which is of most importance, their own errors. They would not know what they ought to do in this life; their activity would have no rational aim ; they would never be able to reconcile themselves to the idea of carnal death ; they could not possess love." In this last sentence Tolstoy reminds us of the noble words of James Martineau who said that " A world without a contingency or an agony could have no hero and no saint, and could enable no son of man to discover that he is a son of God." The great Russian clearly recognized this truth when he said " You speak of the suffer- ings of others; but it is this — it is the lessening, the solacing of these sufferings, which forms the essence of the rational life of men." He goes on to say, " How, then, can the material of his work be a suffering to the workman? It is as if the 37 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy labourer said that an untilled field was a suffer- ing to him. An untilled field can be a suffering only to him who wishes to see it tilled, but does not regard the tilling of it as the task of his Ufe." Perhaps this argument ignores the truth that a man may be unable to till a field, though greatly wishing to till it. Perhaps the keenest of all our sufferings come to us when we are forced to look on the sufferings of those whom we love, whilst we are utterly powerless to assuage them. But, on the whole, Tolstoy's teaching on this subject is wise. Perhaps we may find some sHght approxi- mation to a solution of the eternal problem of suffering by reaHzing the truth that, in a finite being, adequate sympathy can be produced only by personal pain. The young and inexperienced, and those whose life has been almost uniformly happy, are generally very deficient in sympathy with others. Only by first going down into hell can we become genuine Sons of Consolation, and thus be " made partakers of the divine nature," which is Love. Yet, after all, the great problem cannot really 38 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy be solved for us iii this life. There seems to be far more suffering than is necessary. The sufferings of the lower animals are to a great extent inexphcable, and the hideous and prolonged cruelties of men often make faith in a benevolent God almost im- possible. Nor do human sufferings ahvays pro- duce good results morally, so far as we can see. As the late W. R. Greg observed, there are chastise- ments that do not chasten and trials that do not purify. And, as John Stuart Mill observed. Nature, in its dealings with us, often makes no fine or discriminating moral distinctions, and often seems to punish or destroy men for their good deeds. As Emerson thought, prudence would often appear to bid us be afraid of our great quahties, and thank God for our meaner quahties. Spiritual nobleness is usually crowned with thorns, and often leads its possessor to Calvary. Without the hope of a future life it is impossible to justify rationally the creed of optimism or even of true and abiding meliorism. As regards death, which so haunted his soul, Tolstoy showed real insight when he declared that men often fear it chiefly because they have never 39 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- yet found true and adequate life. As John Stuart Mill wisely remarked, it is hard to die with- out having ever truly lived. As Robertson of Brighton said, none of the promises of God are ful- filled in this life. The utterly wasted faculties of some of the very noblest characters seem to demand a future Hfe with quite special eloquence and im- periousness. Over the graves of many grand and heroic failures, over the graves of many glorious spiritual abortions, discerning human pity cries aloud to the far-off Creator with perplexed sorrow and immeasurable suggestiveness. " These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pil- grims on the earth." God's apparent failures are often far more prophetically suggestive than His successes. The noblest of the sons of God are often the most " sore let and hindered " during their earthly careers. They are specially out of harmony with their mundane environment. Un- suited for earthly success, they declare plainly that they seek a better country, that is, a heavenly. Robertson of Brighton would have agreed with 40 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Tolstoy's opinion that men fear death chiefly be- cause they have never yet found the true and satis- fying hfe here on earth ; for he declared that almost the only sohd evidence for immortahty is to be found in the eternal life already begun in our souls during our present existence. As Plato said, it is the child within us that fears death ; and most men never attain genuine spiritual manhood during their existence on earth. Our animal part naturally dreads death as equivalent to total annihilation, feehng instinctively that the eternal life is not for it. A large part of Tolstoy's practical teaching is too much in advance of our age. It is born out of due season, and cannot be thoroughly carried out in the present state of the world. It is an ideal towards which we ought to work. The prophets of Grod are often rather too long-sighted and im- patient. They " behold the land that is very far off." They sometimes ignore the difficulties of weak pilgrims and seek to hurry them unduly on their course. Like James Martineau, they imagine that others are as strong as themselves. They make insufficient allowance for unfavourable cir- 41 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy cumstances. They almost scorn provisional or imperfect virtues. They despise the day of small things. They forget how very gradually God works in ordinary souls. They do not bear in mind the wise teaching of Bishop Butler, who declared that, whilst men are for precipitating things, God is majestically slow in all His works. They would scarcely agree with Bishop Thirlwall, who thought it rather presumptuous to pray, as we do in our burial service in the Church of England, that God will " shortly accomplish the number of His elect and hasten His Kingdom." In their impati- ence great souls often do not perceive that " the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation." They do not understand the slow processes by which God touches to fine issues our merely natural faculties, and brings all-embracing charity out of comradeship, and universal love out of local or sectarian patriotism. Patriotism and comrade- ship are often a kind of schoolmaster to bring ignorant souls to Christ. Profoundly spiritual teachers are inchned to forget that God besets our nature behind as well as before, that He is the Alpha as well as the Omega of pilgrim spirits, that 42 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy He " leads the blind by a way that they know not," that in man'a lowliest human instincts God has im- planted the seeds of the loftiest reUgion. We must not be hasty in pulhng up the apparent tares of our nature, lest perchance we should pull up the wheat also. Tolstoy perhaps ignored the fact that some of his precepts would necessarily be far harder or more difficult to his followers than to himself. Refusing to join in waging war, to pay taxes, or to take oaths, complete non-resistance to evil, and other counsels of perfection were comparatively easy to the great Russian noveUst, on account of the reverence felt towards him by his own nation ; but they would be far more difficult and dangerous to ordinary men for whom the nation in general felt no special rever- ence or esteem. Though a great deal of Tolstoy's practical re- hgion and morahty is, as I have already said, more suited to be an inspiring ideal than a precise and accurate rule for present hfe, of course such high ideals are in some ways most valuable. They prevent men from sinking into the torpid self- satisfaction which is a kind of dry-rot of the soul. 43 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy They force men to cry with St Paul, " Not as though we had already attained." And we believe that, to a very great extent, these high ideals will some day be reahzed. We believe that the king- doms of the world will some day become the King- doms of Christ and His Eternal Father. Coming now to the roots of Tolstoy's philosophy and religion, it appears that we shall find that they are ultimately based on a kind of confident but un- developed Pragmatism, though he often tried to strengthen his system by rather unintelHgible and mystical metaphysics. In his case, the man of action still lived and energized in the man of thought. The heart of a philanthropist, in the best sense of the word, still was beating under the hair-shirt of the mystical ascetic. Tolstoy's large, prolonged, and varied knowledge of the world saved him generally to some extent from the futile attempt to base religion on the cobwebs of fragile, transient, and unverified metaphysics. Like a brilhant man of science, the late Clerk Maxwell, the Russian philosopher usually was not content with a cloud of pretentious generahties. Like the youthful Clerk Maxwell, he generally wanted to 44 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy know " the particular go " of every tiling that he investigated. His feet were almost always on the homely earth, though his soul sometimes soared into the region of clouds. Tolstoy's true home was in the realms of ethics, and he was only driven into metaphysics by what appeared to him neces- sity. What he really loved most was the fertiliz- ing and beneficent spiritual Nile which enriches the best active human life ; and, when he left it for a time and sojourned in the bleak regions of the mystical unkno^vn, his animating and sustaining motive really was the irrepressible desire to find the ultimate sources of the great mysterious river of God. Pity and love drove him to philosophy. Love for man made him thirst for God. Even when " a cloud receives him out of our sight," we beUeve and know that he has gone " to prepare a place for us," or at least to help in preparing it. This great morahst defines human life as an aspiration after welfare, and he refuses to believe that this aspiration is meaningless or futile. He takes his stand philosophically on the instinct to live and to find a real significance in life. In this position Tolstoy has many sympathetic 45 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy comrades. The plea of the wiser Pragmatists is but an enlarged and strengthened form of the ever- recurring argument of the Scottish philosopher, Sir Wilham Hamilton, " Unless our intelligence be declared a he." The Pragmatists speak with greatly enhanced force when they argue that, unless our whole higher nature, with all its abiding postulates, be declared a he, certain faiths of the soul must be accepted as significant and true. When using this argument, they are in complete harmony with the views of the late John Fiske, who declared that he accepted the doctrine of a future life, not as he accepted the proved facts of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reason- ableness of God's working. In the instinct to live and to find a meaning in hfe we discern a strong imphcit argument for rational Theism. This ar- gument seems still a perfectly valid one, and also one that is not seriously weakened by any dis- coveries of Modern Science. Reason cannot well deny its own postulates. If we are sane, it is not likely that the universe is mad. If the universe is to a great extent intel- hgible, it seems likely that it is the product of 46 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy intellect. We cannot destroy philosophy without altjo undermining the very foundations of all science. If the universe naturally evokes thought in us, it surely must contain thought. We certainly seem at times to think God's thoughts after Him. The macrocosm, the ilhmitable and well-ordered heavens, certainly appears to betray or reveal traces of a most powerful mind. Why, then, should we refuse to recognize the agency of this same mind in the workings of the microcosm, in the noblest faculties of the human soul? If the stars are reckoned as the product of reason, why should we suppose that man's highest ethical and spiritual hfe is the product of unreason? All real thought seems to postulate a kind of pre-established har- mony between the universe and our human inteUigence. The relation of knowledge seems to imply or to involve some measure of affinity be- tween the knower and the thing known. If utter agnosticism were our predestined condition with regard to the very highest things that vitally concern our life, it does not seem probable that we should attain tolerably satisfactory knowledge as regards lower things. Human reason, after being 47 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy exercised with considerable success on physical problems, grows bold and venturesome. It dares to beUeve that God is on its side. It argues in much the same way as Manoah's wife is said to have argued in the days of old : "If the Lord were pleased to kill us, neither would He have showed us all these things, nor would, as at this time, have told us such things as these." Can we suppose that instinct is full of real signi- ficance amongst animals, and yet, in its more de- veloped and intellectuahzed condition in man, radically deceptive. Does God or Nature lead the bhnd rightly up to a certain point, and after- wards begin to mislead them? Does God begin His work well, and afterwards bungle over it de- plorably? Was John Stuart Mill wise in suggest- ing that some strange hmitation of power com- pelled God to implant in us inextinguishable desires which could never be satisfied? Can reason aid and abet the rebelUon of the senses against itself? Certainly instinct, in its earher and cruder forms, often seems to reproach reason as a false guide, and to disparage it, as the Israelites disparaged the leadership of Moses and 48 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy of his God when they cried reproachfully, " Hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? " Can we truly say to our Creator, " Neither hast Thou dehvered Thy people at all? " If men were not destined to arrive at even provisional and partly satisfying truth, why should reason lead them into the wilderness of arid perplexity out of the well-stored Egypt of primitive instincts ? Why should it conduct them into a region of total darkness and barrenness? Why should it at once confess its own powerlessness to find satisfying good, and at the same time brand and paralyse those original instincts which at least procured for man some degree of provisional hfe and satis- faction? Perhaps the truth really is, as Tolstoy probably supposed, that our higher and more illuminated instincts are in fact full of implicit reason, of reason strugghng to be born into the world of intellectu- ally established verities. And so Pascal declared that the heart has its reasons which the reason knows not. Perhaps the very best reason, in the days of its infancy, has to rest for a time in the lowly manger of our natural affections, as the Child c 49 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Jesus once rested in the manger of Bethlehem. There often appears to be " no room " for new truths of the noblest sort in the rather prim inns of philosophical systems. As Emerson declared, we are frequently " wiser than we know." That great imperial human faculty, imagination, in its finest forms, is perhaps a kind of inspired and venturesome kinsman of reason. The poetry of the soul is often far truer and more significant than its prose, so that James Martineau could declare " there is no prose religion." Philosophy is often despairing, and cries, in its bewilderment, like the servant of the prophet at Dothan, "Alas! my master, how shall we do? " but the noblest sort of imagination has a keener vision, so that it per- ceives that the mountain is not forsaken by God, but "full of horses and chariots of fire" sent by God to dehver His people. In the formal academies of arid rationalism there sometimes stands one whom they as yet know not, " in form like unto the Son of God." Reason, without imaginative spiritual- ity, often seems much like a bruised and baffled eagle whose wings have been cHpped, so that it cannot soar into its real home on high. Logic 50 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy alone is not an adequate guide either to the King- dom of God or to a satisfying life on earth. It certainly does appear that there are more and richer things in the human soul than are dreamt of in the human understanding. The forms or shaping moulds of knowledge should not wage war against the materials of knowledge. Mere thought by itself is empty. ExpHcit reason should not dis- dain impUcit reason. Abstract and formal logic should not seek to pour discredit over the rich, though novel and as yet unclassified, treasures of psychology. Severe reasoning should not ostracize wonder and awe, or expect celestial messengers to wear the prescribed uniform of rather pedantic schools under local or sectarian control. We must not demand from angels that they should at once tell us their names, in order that we may forthwith proceed to dissect and classify them as though they were insects. Wise men learn how to be content with " knowing in part." It is certainly rather humiliating to our reason in its present state to reaUze the very probable fact that, whatever the true solution of the mys- 51 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy teries of the universe may be, if it were disclosed to us now with our present fa,culties, it would at once be considered by us to be so strange, so con- trary to experience, and so miraculous as to be utterly incredible. Freethinkers may get rid of paltry miracles, but they are destined hereafter to be confronted with what will inevitably appear to be immeasurably greater miracles. So perhaps it may not be wise for them to allow their faculties of awe, wonder, and reverence to become entirely atrophied. We feel effects long before we are able to under- stand causes. Astronomers, observing some of the perplexing perturbations of the planet Uranus, guessed at the existence of some other disturbing planet as yet unknown to them, and they were right. And, in a similar way, Pragmatists, such as Tolstoy and many others, may turn out to be right in inferring the existence of God from some otherwise inexpHcable phenomena of human life. Tolstoy's conception of the nature of God was very hazy. At times he ascribed undoubted personal- ity to God; but on other occasions he seemed to conceive of Him in a decidedly Pantheistic way. 52 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy His theology, in his later years, appeared to waver between Unitarian Theism and a vague and mys- tical Pantheism; yet how can we love an imper- sonal being? He steadfastly held to the idea that there is and nmst be a God of some sort. He in- sisted on basing moraht}^ upon the love of God. He thought that we must love God first, and man afterwards. As a verifying faculty, the great Russian knew well that reason is of the very highest value. He also really valued science, whilst keenly conscious of its inevitable hmitations. He thought that, in its imceasing search for the origin of life, it had almost forgotten to seek for the meaning of hfe. Like other profound thinkers, the Russian morahst held that we must search for God with all our dis- tinctly human faculties. Thus only can we really find Him. Reason, when it refuses to co-operate with the other faculties of our nature, is often the author of at least apparent confusion. It some- times introduces into the best human life a vacil- lation and incoherence of aim from which our half- animal hfe is happily almost free. Hence it is clear that reason should not harshly blame us for seeking 53 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy supplementary assistance. To some tortured spirits it has seemed, after prolonged and sorrow- ful search, that reason threatens to cast a withering bhght over all the most interesting and cherished elements of our existence. It makes an arid wilderness of unceasing doubt, and calls it peace. Reason threatens to afflict us with a hopeless and incurable vacillation, as it afflicted the lonely Amiel, whose aspirations were unceasingly baffled, or else it sometimes practically offers us the dread- ful alternatives of a very superior pig-sty or a madhouse for the learned as our habitual dwell- ing-place. Reason, when working in harmony with our other noblest faculties, seems a real friend; but, when isolated from them in a kind of proud and despotic sovereignty, it sometimes assumes a de- cidedly sinister aspect, as though the dread in- herent irony of the universe had been concentrated in it and had visited our earth, in order to mock or deride the vanity of all our best endeavours. We sometimes feel inchned to describe the purely speculative reason as Goldwin Smith described Jowett, as having no clinch in its nature, as tend- 54 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy ing to keep itself and its followers in a state of per- petual doubt and hesitation. When Bishop Butler declared that reason is the only faculty that we have by which to judge everything, including revelation itself, he used the word reason in a large sense, so as to include what Kant called practical reason. And it is manifest that Tolstoy also used the word in the same sense. Reason, as conceived by him, was closely and vitally connected with our ethical life. In its purely speculative aspect, reason often seems to be the chosen home of endless contradictions or antinomies, so that it fails to help us in the emergencies and difficulties of actual hfe. Character seems necessary in order to give speculative reason a clinch, and so enable it to come to some definite conclusions. We must do the will of God, if we wish tobe able to judge of the truth or falsehood of doctrines affecting our highest hfe. The practical reason seems needed to strengthen the purely speculative reason, as Aaron and Hur held up or stayed the wearied hands of Moses when the battle was raging against Amalek, and victory depended upon the abihty of exhausted Moses to continue holding up his hands. 55 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Certainly the speculative reason, when acting alone, often appears austere and stern to many of the best of the sons of men. It either speaks to them in an unknown tongue or else in too hard and inhuman a way. Can it, then, blame us if we turn sometimes to our nearer kindred, if we turn to the " Word made flesh," to a kind of incarnate or humanized reason, or even if from such Judaic harshness we " turn to the Gentiles," and seek for God's primitive and abiding evangel in the whole of man's nature rather than in the cheerless and pedantic schools of formal logicians? Our ethical nature, especially its finest product called Love, often seems to outrun merely speculative reason in the pilgrimage to satisfying truth. To many of us, whether we will or no, human heroism often appears to be a far better revealer of God than any amount of flawless syllogisms. Tolstoy, in most of his moods, and when not misled by a spurious metaphysical mysticism, as he sometimes certainly was, perceived plainly enough that our pilgrimage must necessarily be from the human to the divine. In his hours of clearest vision, he would have agreed with Jowett when he 56 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy declared that we are more sure of the validity of our own moral convictions than of the existence of God, and more sure of the existence of God than of a future Ufe for our race. For Tolstoy usually, and for us always, the way to faith is, for the most part, anjnductive \vay, as it was to Manoah's wife. We travel from man to God, from the facts of experi- ence to definite doctrines ; and we wish to submit ourselves to the joint guardianship of the best and largest human reason and the best human love. Neither of these leaders satisfies us, when taken alone. Then onl}' do we feel safe when reason no longer depreciates or " envies " love, and when love no longer " vexes " reason, when they advance before us as brother warriors in our perilous pil- grimage to the celestial city. We beheve that the true messengers or prophets of God bring to the human race very varied but not ultimately or intrinsically discordant words of guidance and warning. As regards the origin of the human soul, Tolstoy was far too dogmatic and oracularly mystical. He says that " the bond which unites all the scattered consciousnesses, which latter in their turn unite 57 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- one body, is something very definite, although in- dependent of the conditions of time and space ; we bring it with us into the world from a region out- side of time and space ; and this something, which consists in a certain exclusive relationship of my being to the world, is my only veritable and true seK. . . . My relationship to the world was not set up in this life, nor did it begin with my body, nor with the series of consciousnesses which suc- ceed each other in time, but was prior to them." Yet Tolstoy denies personal immortaUty. His statement just given seems to be very rash and unduly dogmatic. As regards the origin and destiny of the human soul, Carlyle spoke far more cautiously and wisely when he exclaimed, " But whence, heaven, whither? Sense knows not; faith knows not; only that it is through mystery to mystery, from God and to God." Tolstoy, whilst wisely rejecting the Positivist's doctrine as to immortaUty, seems to involve himself in hopeless difficulties when he wrote thus: " It is clear that, for men, the perpetuation of the human race can- not satisfy the incessant demand for an eternal special self; but the idea of fife beginning over 58 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy again implies that of the cessation of life ; and, if hfe has not existed in the past, has not existed always, then it cannot exist after." This teaching as to the need for a special self appears to be in flat contradiction to the same writer's repudiation of personal existence after death. What can he mean by a self that is not personal? And his teaching is full of other diffi- culties. He seems to confuse potential existence with actual, indeterminate with determinate. The ultimate source of hfe is unquestionably eternal; but its differentiated products are not eternal. Does our author mean that God could 7iot create, that He could not bring, out of the richness of His own primal hfe, things new as well as old? Tolstoy also seems to minimize unduly the influence of heredity in determining the character of the soul. The Ego itself, as merely an abiding principle of unity, may perhaps be independent of heredity; it may come to us from an unknown world as a kind of vague and undeveloped effluence from the divine mind; but its definite differentiation into character certainly appears to come from ancestors. The original " treasure " is very greatly influenced 59 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy by the earthen vessels in which it is deposited > The flesh greatly influences the spirit to which it gives embodiment in time and space. Tolstoy could not possibly know that each self or soul existed from all eternity as a unit, outside of time and space. If time and space are necessary forms or necessary data of our intelHgence, we cannot possibly escape from them even for a brief moment, and view things as they would manifest themselves to a being for whom time and space do not exist. We cannot, even for a moment, jump out of our intellectual skins. We cannot thus take by storm the arcana of the universe. The eagle cannot outsoar the atmosphere. The conditioned cannot become the unconditioned. No clairvoy- ance or intellectual intuition of the Infinite and Eternal is possible for man with his present faculties. Sir Wilham Hamilton's arguments against Schelling's doctrine of Intellectual Intui- tion appear to be unanswerable. If, for some brief moment, our soul was taken out of time and space, if it were thus unclothed, we should inevitably lose for the time what we call our consciousness, which imphes time as succession. Stripped of our 60 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy needed and habitual faculties of cognition, we should really know nothing. At the very best we could only jeel in a vague and indeterminate way, and this vague feeling could not be recalled, and so could not afterwards be translated into the language of ordinary intellectual hfe. The ecstasy would pass away and be as though it had never been. It seems perfectly manifest that Tolstoy's sup- posed or implied spiritual voyage into a region beyond time and space was as purely imaginary as the intellectual and spiritual journeys of the intre- pid Swedenborg. And it also seems clear that, even if that voyage had been real, it would have been quite fruitless, so far as any permanent and communicable results are concerned. Our traveller would perhaps have found liimself in a land of stupendous nightmare, as full of competing incon- ceivabihties as the region depicted for us by Dean Mansel, wherein the Infinite and the Absolute were supposed to dwell at once in eternal union and in eternally irreconcilable dissidence, each torn by its own internal discords and quite unable to harmon- ize itself with the other, like some unhappy couple 6i Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- held fast in the bonds of a forced and uncongenial marriage. Or perhaps our venturesome explorer would not have been able to exist at all, even for a short sojourn, in that strange world in which con- flicting inconceivabilities for ever wage unceasing war against each other. He might perhaps have found that world perilous as well as bewildering, " a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof," if indeed that dread realm tolerated, even for a moment, the intrusion of ahen inhabitants, pre- suming to enter into it with no wedding garments of superhuman endowments. Closely connected with Tolstoy's teaching as to the origin — or rather the eternal existence — of the human soul, is his view as to the nature of a future life. He says that beUef in a personal future life belongs to a barbarous age, and was not taught by Jesus Christ. One cannot help asking whether Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Browning, Tennyson, and James Martineau, and Emerson in his less Pan- theistic moods, were all barbarians intellectually. Our author does not perceive that, if personahty were really destroyed, all that is best and finest in human life would also be destroyed. The self, 62 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy when stripped of personality, would be only a poor ghost of a self, and quite incapable of love. It does not follow that, because the cruder conceptions of personality were rather absurd, personahty itself, in all its phases, is therefore an absurd idea. The idea of God has been altered, developed, and rationalized in the course of ages quite as much as the idea of personahty. Yet we do not say that the idea of God is intrinsically absurd in all its phases. There is scarcely any great question concerning which more irrelevant nonsense has been wTitten than concerning personahty. Matthew Arnold never really understood this matter. Though a most graceful writer, he was neither a very deep tliinker, nor a very exact and patient one. He argued as if he had travelled through the whole universe and thoroughly examined every possible phase of personahty. The fact that we, in our present condition, cannot depict to ourselves kinds of personahty exempt from our present human limitations, does not in the least prove that none such exist. There may very well be in higher worlds forms of personality as much transcending 63 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy ours as ours transcends the vague and shadowy personahty of animals. If in the animal world there exist any philosophers of a school similar to that of Matthew Arnold, it is not altogether un- likely that they firmly believe that personahty necessarily implies four legs or a tail. Though he posed as an agnostic, Arnold was in some ways a very rash dogmatist. Probably there are in the universe many enlarged forms of personality com- pared to which ours as known at present is only a meagre and shadowy outhne. Possibly personal- ity may hereafter be vastly enlarged without losing its intrinsic nature. Personahty may be agglomerated in larger masses, as it was supposed to be in the men-women mentioned by Plato. Possibly something resembling the Christian idea of the highest personahty as a kind of Trinity in unity may be the culmination of it. Herbert Spencer's difficulties in beheving in the conscious- ness or self-consciousness of God imply the very unnecessary conception that the divine nature is merely a lonely and seK-enclosed unity, a kind of Cronos who has devoured his offspring, if he ever had any. The Trinitarians make room for God's 64 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy self-consciousness in one way, and the Unitarians in another way. Tlie latter conceive of the universe as God's Eternal Son, as to some extent His alter Ego, or at least as His partially objectified self, in whose spacious regions the divine intellect roams freely throughout the ages. Perhaps God pur- posely assigns some share of His personality, some degree of selfhood, to His children, in order that He may hold communion with them. If God were the only person in the whole universe, we cannot help thinking that He would be completely soh- tary. Perhaps He stands a little way off from each separate soul, in order that it may be able to draw nigh unto Him with voluntary allegiance and sympathy. So far as our personality is an isolating power, we are quite wilhng that it should pass away in a higher world. We would gladly give up all that is repellent in it, so that souls might flow freely into souls. We beUeve that personaHty might very well lose its present cramping and fettering hmitations without losing its essential features. We believe that eventually we may be made " partakers of the divine nature " without forfeit- D 65 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy ing the best and most vital characteristics of human nature. We beHeve that personality might very well become diaphanous and penetrable or porous without impairment of its present effi- cacy, that it might be " clothed upon " with new powers, whilst losing nothing that is truly valuable in its present powers. To the vast majority of our race a strictly im- personal future hfe would appear to be no real life at all. A self devoid of personaHty, if such a thing could exist, would be ethically and emotionally colourless, and therefore uninteresting. If our emancipation from time and space is to mean the utter dehumanizing and depersonahzing of our higher nature, if it is to involve the removal of what we now beHeve to be the essential conditions of the best and truest love in all regions of existence, then we feel convinced that such progress would be a ruinous victory. Love could scarcely exist without distinct personaHty. We cannot believe in the loves of the triangles or the categories, or even of pallid entities and quiddities. If the whole universe were agglomerated into one huge Ego with very slightly differentiated phases, or 66 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy into an Ego ^vith only ghosts of itself, we believe that its best ethical and spiritual life would be reduced to ashes, and the moral world would henceforth be like the moon, a mournful world full of the blasted possibiUties of hfe. In putting on a kind of Pantheistic universality, in discarding all characteristic features, we should put off all true nobleness. We should henceforth be good only as the winds are good. We might still in some sense receive the gifts of God, but we could feel no love for the divine giver. Thus all the highest kinds of human development would pass away. Ethical choice would become impossible, since that impHes personahty. The Son of God would go forth to war no more. Strenuousness would die away. We should drift as the leaves. Self-sacrifice would be impossible, when a distinct self no longer existed. Adoration or worship also seems to imply the existence of open-eyed per- sonahty or self -consciousness. There is nothing admirable in unintentional worship, if such worship there could be. Heroism and the spirit of adven- ture — so dear to the heart of man — would be 67 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy entirely gone. Without personality the universe would become even worse than Browning's im- aginary star, Rephan. It would be a sort of abiding Golgotha. The city of God would be nothing better than a necropoHs. In such a world it is difficult to see how even intellect would survive, for the relation of knowledge seems to imply, at least for a time, some measure of difference or detachment, as well as of resemblance, between the knower and the thing known. The rushing together and fusion of all its intellectual and spiritual atoms would be as fatal to the higher universe as a similar coalescence of its material atoms would be to the physical universe. Death or torpor would reign supreme. Surely it is unwise to depict the future life in such a way as to render it entirely unattractive to men in general. Tolstoy seems, moreover, to contradict himself in his teaching about the future Ufe. He says that the soul is fundamentally always the same, and that, when it came into this world, it did not come as a merely vague and featureless potentiality, but as an individuahzed self — a self with decided tastes in the shape of 68 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy definite likings and dislikings. If this be so, and if the self is to be conceived as always remaining the same, what ground has the Russian teacher for denying a personal life to the soul in other worlds? It is surely impossible to imagine a being with decided character, with definite fikings and dislikings, without personafity. And, ac- cording to our perplexing teacher, if the soul once had personality, it miist retain it for ever. If men in general should ever receive Tolstoy's apparent conception of a future life, they would certainly cease to care for renewed existence after death. And so our 'present life would lose a great deal of its best inspiration. The hope of im- mortaUty would then cease to nerve men for high spiritual enterprises. Most men would then practically ignore the idea of a future existence. Worldliness would then seem the highest practical wisdom and the plain teaching of common-sense. We should snatch at real enjoyment whilst we are able to procure it. We should try to make the most of our transient personahty. The philosophy of prudent sensuahty might then appear to many to be the highest wisdom. It would then seem as 69 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy if, in literal truth, " God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise," as if high aspirations were mere folly and a waste of time, as if earthly life was a mere joke, and the future life a fantastic and bewildering dream, as if moral seriousness were almost a sin, as if Renan was right in thinking that the old French gaiety of heart is the best philosophy of hfe, as if the whole universe was either a playground, or a gaudy simulacrum, or a huge mocking irony, as if human nobleness was a mere abortion born by chance and out of due season, an unwelcome intruder in the unending comedy of ceaseless and purposeless development, in which hapless beings struggled up into personaHty, only to lose it when it had be- come truly admirable, as if the whole universe was the production of a capricious or vacillating mad- man who did not really know what he wanted. Tolstoy was by nature a vivid and profound psychologist, and a metaphysician only by necessity. His true and original affinity was with Augustine, Dante, Pascal, and Cardinal Newman rather than with abstract pliilosophers like Parmenides or Hegel. His temperament was too 70 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy fervid and passionate for a great metaphysician. He was deficient in intellectual calmness and patience. His mission was to jeel things rather than to analyse them. He was more of a poet than of a logician. His thoughts spontaneously embodied themselves in pictures rather than in abstract categories or intellectual forms. To a very great extent he thought in metaphors. His ideas flowed rapidly and sometimes wildly, like some impetuous mountain stream. In Emersonian language, the Russian seer was often " wiser than he knew." Some of his most intense convictions could never be adequately set forth in syllogisms. Consequently we are at Uberty to accept in some degree almost all his ethics, whilst repudiating a large portion of his metaphysics. In the case of Tolstoy, as in that of Amiel, it seems plain that the real and original basis of his nature and the man within the man were pro- foundly social and benevo^mt. To some extent he was a kind of Good Samaritan who had lost his way. The impersonal or Buddhistic element in him was an after-growth due more to circumstances than to inherent necessity, and not expressive of 71 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy liis fundamental feelings. He only renounced the world because he could not mend it or make it truly happy. Stoical asceticism was in his case a sort of confession of failure, a kind of anodyne in some ways useful to assuage the pangs of baffled benevolence. Christ was born in the scarred and bruised spirit of the noble reformer long before despairing Buddha and the mystical ascetics in- fluenced it. Tolstoy's conversion itself was not, as many have supposed, an intellectual decUne or fall. That final spiritual storm had long been gathering in the gloomy recesses of his tortured soul, and its distant preparatory rumbHngs were quite audible, at least to those who had ears with which to hear, in many touching and pathetic passages in his greatest stories. But what did constitute a kind of dechne or fall was the great writer's partial captivity in the bondage of asceticism and an irrational system of metaphysics. To a consider- able extent this partial captivity marred his later teaching, though it never became the real basis of his reHgion, which was ultimately built on the abiding rock of a true psychology illuminated by 72 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy a most piercing insight into the deepest recesses of man's strangely complex nature. In his later years it is to be feared that the depersonahzing, mystical, and ascetic elements in Tolstoy's religion were becoming very unduly aggressive. His soul was trying, though happily not quite successfully, to bring itself into harmony with the doctrine preached by Emerson, when, in one of his Pantheistic moods, he declared that, through our particular human affections for persons, we are put in training for a love that knows not persons. To most of us this strictly im- personal love cannot but appear rather Uke that feehng which Aristotle called ivatery affection. We consider it a kind of Satan assuming the garb of an angel of light, a sort of emotional tepidness that seeks to array itself in the glorious robes of that divine charity which knows how to concen- trate as well as to diffuse itself, which can truly love all men whilst it is not ashamed to love some more than others. True Pauline and Christian charity grows and thrives all the more vigorously because, from time to time, it finds a rallying place in certain fervent personal loves. In these it 73 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy wisely concentrates itself and gathers together its scattered forces, in order that it may flow- forth with enhanced energy and increased volume over the wide weary wastes of universal human sorrow and suffering. Jesus Himself could genuinely love all His disciples, though some of them were dearer and more congenial to Him than others. True charity or love in its noblest forms is in some measure hke the divine love. In some ways it is ubiquitous, though in other ways it seems condensed or concentrated. As Dr Martineau said concerning the omnipresence of God and His special presence in the soul of Christ, no distant star missed Him the more because He shone with such pecuhar brightness in the fair glory of that pure life. Emerson's philosophy of emotion is certainly a false and misleading one, and it is a great pity that, in his later years, Tolstoy in some degree adopted it. It is by specially loving some men, and by continuing to love them specially, that we are best enabled to learn wide-spreading benevolence. We must go on loving those whom we have seen with special intimacy, if we are to 74 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- be able, with any rational persistency to love those whom we have not seen. The false teaching of the ascetics and of men like Emerson was perhaps beginning to some extent to diminish tlie natural affectionateness of Tolstoy, as a rather different species of asceticism influenced Pascal when he came to look with disapprobation on the signs of strong affection which he saw be- tween his sister and her children. In both cases alike the true Son of Man was being sacrificed to a far lower ideal. But happily the Russian prophet died before his natural nobleness and his profound and most tender humanity could be very nmch injured b}' a false philosophy. God " proved him, and found him worthy for Himself." To " depart and be with Christ," to return to the bosom of that impassioned human love from which he had in some measure wandered, was indeed " far better " for this great pilgrim than to linger on whilst his finest spiritual and moral quaUties were gradually becoming partially atrophied. ^Vhen the scarred and battered soul of this true follower of the Son of Man migrated to the fontal Love of the universe, 75 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy we may well believe that the dimness of his partial captivity was over for ever. When his aching and partially frozen heart was warmed and quickened by closest vital contact with the Sacred Heart of Jesus — the most loving and profoundly human heart that ever gladdened our dark and suffering world, — we may well believe that all wish to be depersonalized completely passed away, and that his original affectionateness returned in fullest force, so that he now knows right well that man's appointed way to the divine is through prolonged experience of the human, that our fellow-men are not snares of Satan, but stepping-stones by which we slowly climb towards the very loftiest throne of God. We believe that in another and larger world the soul of this true seeker after God has recovered its own veritable nature in all its glorious plenitude of gifts, that he has recognized the inner and abiding significance of St Paul's daring saying, " Love never faileth." We believe that the partial eclipse of human love is now over in this strugghng spirit, and that he has at last perceived that the truest prophets of God call upon us to 76 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy " cease from man " in his lower phases, only in order that we may commune more intimately with man in his higher and God-illuminated phases. The greatest religious guides bid us turn from the mere surface of men, chiefly in order that we may dive down into those marvellous depths in which God for ever dwells as the very soul of their souls. Viewed merely as an animal, man is a thick veil which hides God. Viewed as a spirit capa'jle of real love, man is the true Shekinah, a veritable temple of God, a genuine incarnation of many of the noblest attributes of the Most High. And though at present " the hght shineth in darkness," though now, in its unwilling subjection to vanity, the creature is but a very imperfect mirror of the moral splendour of the Creator, yet for patient and sympathetic eyes there shine forth at times many genuine fore-gleams of future perfection, many startling indications of a divine glory to come, so that we cannot bear to think of separation from our race, so that, as we reahze the profound svggestiveness of man's strugghng and sorely- baffled heroism, we lift up our eyes to heaven with exultant hopefulness, and, undis)nayed by present 77 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy sinfulness, cry aloud with the aspiring and pilgrim spirit of the great apostle of love, " Be- loved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be." During his later years Tolstoy's spiritual vision was certainly far less keen and penetrating than that of St Paul. He knew that " by man comes death," but he scarcely reaHzed the complementary truth that " by man comes also the resurrection from the dead." The Apostle to the Gentiles knew that, if the sons of Adam kill us, the sons of God make us alive again; but the Russian moralist tended to lose sight of this latter consola- tory truth. The influence of Rousseau and his broad humanity, so dominant in Tolstoy's earHer life, was in great measure replaced by the rather mahgn influence of souls like Pascal at his worst, when most enslaved by a hard, gloomy, and irrational and dehumanizing asceticism. However, as I have already said, the process of intellectual and moral and emotional degenera- tion in this noble soul was not allowed to go very far. The spirit of Christ and, to some extent, the teaching of Rousseau, continued to counteract 78 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy the evil influence of mystical asceticism. The seed of genuine Christianity remained in Tolstoy even unto the end, so that he could not sin or err fatally. We bcUeve that his apparent desire to be depersonalized in a future Hfe was but a transient one, in some ways resembhng the wish of Professor Huxley that his moral nature might be mechanically regulated hke a clock. In both cases alike, the real and abiding man, the truly characteristic self, would soon grow utterly weary of such necessitated and meaningless virtue. Huxley and the Russian morahst were both essentially warriors, and the longing for rest was but a temporary sign of ethical exhaustion. Cardinal Newman seems also to have experienced this same spiritual lassitude and despondency. He said, in a letter to the late Dean Plumptr , that he longed for complete fixity of condition in heaven, and could not reconcile himself to the notion of a state in which a moral fall might still be possible. Great souls, hke that of Ehjah, seem specially hable to such fits of despair. Their high ideals pour contempt over their actual achieve- ments. 79 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy But, now that the noble-minded Russian has gone behind the veil, we beHeve that his temporary- despondency has for ever passed away. We cannot imagine that fiery nature reduced to a state of passive recipiency or inertness. We re- member the wise teaching of John Stuart Mill who declared his behef that, if there is any future life for our race, it is not likely to be wanting in the best quahties of our present life. And certainly benevolent activity is one of the very best elements of our present existence. No doubt the soul of Russia's greatest ethical teacher has now " come to itself," has taken up again its old glorious labour, and now thoroughly reaHzes the profound wisdom of the great Son of Man when He exclaimed, " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." It ^ impossible for those who really believe in a future Hfe to suppose that the souls of the most heroic of the human race are therein deprived of their most vitally characteristic quahties. The peace of God is the happy peace of successful and bene- volent work, and not that of suppressed energies. If one should seek to find the emancipated spirit of the Russian reformer in another world, one 80 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy would naturally look for it amongst the bcBt and most active missionaries of redeeming pity and love, and not amongst the spiritually idle and apathetic. If the greatest and noblest of the sons of men do cease hereafter at times from what is called active work, we believe that, during that transient cessation from labour, they would be found sojourning with martyr spirits under the altar of the Most High, and crying sympathetically to Him, as they look back lovingly on earth's unending sorrows and afflictions, " How long, Lord, how long? " True prayer is true labour. Tolstoy has bequeathed to us a precious legacy of profoundly suggestive ethical and spiritual thought. And our manifest duty is to use it wisely, so that it may be fruitful and a blessing to coming generations of men. We must remem- ber that many of his precepts were essentially counsels of perfection, based on a belief in the true progressiveness of our race. It will not be wise for us to demand from beginners in the higher Hfe complete adherence to all these precepts in their very exacting elevation. We must remember that Jesus Himself practised a wise economy in deaUng E 8i Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy out His wisdom to His uncultivated disciples. The noblest ideals are unnecessarily and often per- manently discredited when they are born out of due season, when they are offered to men before their minds are ripe for their reception. St Paul was content for a time to nourish some of his followers with milk fit for babes, when they were not ready for strong meat. We must lead on our weak ethical pilgrims very gradually. We must remember that it is only in almost the last stage of their spiritual journey that they can be fit to hold adequate and unrestrained communion with the shining ones of the celestial kingdom, with souls like those of St Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, Dante, Fenelon, Madame Guy on, and Leo Tolstoy, Considering that the Russian teacher had lost all faith in the infalHbihty of the Bible, the ex- treme and urgent hterahsm with which he treated some of its ethical and social precepts is remark- able. He makes no allowance for the fact that, at certain periods, some truths are obHged to be so emphasized as to be overstated, if men's attention is to be drawn to them at aU successfully. If all men everywhere saw everything exactly in its 82 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy true and just proportions, the enthusiasm necessary for bringing about great ethical and spiritual changes would be lacking. Some true doctrines jnust be exaggerated for a time, if they are to secure consideration. They must strive and cry and lift up their voices in the streets. Different ages of the worid seem to require that some truths should temporarily be given a prominence and an almost exclusive prominence to which they are not per- manently entitled. Reaction almost always goes too far for a time, as it did in the case of the Pro- testant Reformation; and later thought corrects its exaggerations. New truths have to fight for their existence, and so they assume a rather undue hostihty to other truths, which appear to be con- tradictory to them, whilst in reahty they are only complementary. A judicious Hooker could never have accompHshed the work done by Luther. Tolstoy's mind, like that of Luther, was in some ways ill-balanced. It was far more fervent than comprehensive. It was very deficient in the judicial temper. To men of practical minds gifted with sobriety of judgment, Tolstoy's glorification of permanent 83 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy anarchy in social matters is perhaps the most re- pulsive element in his teaching. He failed to perceive that anarchy, like scepticism, can only be regarded as essentially preparatory, as a kind of John the Baptist in the ethical and social world. Men cannot Uve wisely and effectively in a state of permanent revolution. Because some laws are bad, it does not follow that we ought to have no laws at all. It is difficult to imagine a prosperous and happy nation which should have no govern- ment, no laws, no pohce, no private property, no resistance to violence and evil, and no restraints on lawless people. Till men become angels, some enforcement of well-considered laws seems indispensably necessary. Sociahsm, in its extreme forms, would not be a really unmixed good. It postulates conditions which are never hkely to be found in this world. It arises out of a correct perception of the very real miseries and evils of our present civihzation ; but, in its violent reaction against them, it would assuredly introduce other evils. Doubtless, the present immense difference between the extremely rich and the extremely poor is both undesirable and 84 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy unchristian; but the desire for absolute equality amongst men is a fooHsh one. Though the poor should no longer be with us, inequahty in other forms would still exist. Diflfer- ences of age, talents, and experience cannot be abohshed. Nor is it really desirable that they should be abolished. Some, at least, of the needs of others are valuable as giving a sphere for the exercise of many of the highest qualities of our race. If all men were equally rich and fortunate, there would not be much sphere for generosity. Many of the tenderest forms of human affection are based on inequality. Love between the old and the young generally postulates very great differences in knowledge and power. Such pro- tecting and confiding affection need not in the least imply any sense of patronizing superiority on the one side or any degrading serviUty on the other side. In his latest years Tolstoy's sociaUsm was con- siderably marred by the intrusion of ascetic, stoical, and even anti-social elements. He appears to have wished to make himself and other men self- Buflficing and independent of others, ignoring the abiding truth that " no man liveth unto himself." S5 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy If we are to love people, we must learn love by mutual service, and, if all men were really equal in strength and wisdom, such service would com- paratively seldom be required. The weakness and wants of some men at once bind them to their fellows and evoke love in the hearts of their fellows. If human hfe is to be a training in love, some inequalities, Uke some pains and sorrows, must remain, and we must be content to receive much from others. Very great variety seems to be necessary in order to make human hfe genuinely interesting, and some forms of extreme sociaUsm would certainly tend to lessen variety. Tolstoy did not perceive that real sociahsm is hardly reconcilable with that intense individucUity which he and Rousseau so greatly valued. The state of nature, so greatly idealized by these thinkers, on account of its supposed absolute freedom, is scarcely compatible with the highly- organized condition of strictly sociahstic life. Spontaneity and the spirit of individual venture- Bomeness would probably be much diminished. In fact, it would scarcely be too much to say that 86 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy the Russian teacher's ideal gathers together two really conflicting elements, intense and unre- strained individualism and the complete subor- dination of the individual to the community. Of these two elements it is evident that the individual- istic one, with its attendant freedom from law, was the more deep-seated and fundamental one in the mind of Tolstoy. Adequate co-operation between a number of individually lawless units would appear to be impossible; and we now per- ceive that such co-operation is the very soul of progress and the only thing that can mitigate the abominable and inhuman horror of the unceasing and relentless struggle for existence. Such co- operation is a kind of angel of the agony to sym- pathetic and afflicted spirits in our restless age. It is evident that the Russian moraUst's philosophy is, in great measure, as a house divided against itself. The real truth appears to be that the mind and soul of Leo Tolstoy were, to a great extent, in a state of chaos. His teaching is profoundly suggestive and interesting, but neither coherent, well-reasoned, nor final. Like Socrates, this 87 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy innovating moralist tried to wake men up from the deep slumber of fancied knowledge and good- ness; but he gave them very little permanently satisfying knowledge. He was a kind of John the Baptist in the moral and social world, by his unflinching sincerity, by his keen and unsparing exposure of present evils and shams, and by his very exacting ethical austerity, making ready the way for the advent of a greater son of man who has yet to come. But we ought always to re- member that this rugged evangehst had in him a warm heart of sympathy, pity, and universal love, which we do not find in the stern precursor of Jesus. Notwithstanding his grave intellectual faults and deficiencies, the scarred soul of the Russian pilgrim has been to very many a kind of battered Greatheart in their ever-recurring hours of despondency and weakness. His invincible belief in the coming complete victory of human love is as a strong cordial to many fainting hearts of the benevolent, as they endeavour to follow Christ through the bleak and cheerless wilder- ness of this present evil world, with all its appalhng cruelties, with all its gross and per- 88 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy plexing darkness, and witli all its sorely baffled aspirations. The mingled weakness and strength of Tolstoy as a rehgious seer and teacher are nowhere so strikingly exhibited as in his doctrine of complete non-resistance to evil. In that doctrine we find in strange combination a profoimd perception of the real drift of Christianity and very considerable blindness or ignorance as to the best and most efficient way of propagating practical religion in the present age. The piercing insight of a genuine prophet is joined with an almost childish ignorance as to the best means of estabhshing the kingdom of Gk)d on earth in present circumstances. In a very remarkable way God showed Tolstoy the things that shall be hereafter in the realms of ethical and spiritual life ; but his impatience and precipitation of judgment often made him overlook the very real difficulties which beset us when we endeavour to follow Christ adequately and completely. He, hke Emerson, was often much too long-sighted with regard to the coming reign of righteousness on earth, just as Carlyle was habitually far too short- sighted. 89 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy It is perfectly manifest that, with regard to the life of nations, the policy of absolute non-resistance to evil would lead to disastrous or very undesirable results, if it were carried out thoroughly in the present state of the world. Europe, in general, was quite right in resisting the ambition of Napoleon for almost universal sovereignty. And in our age it is plain enough that unresisting submission to the power of the great German empire would produce very evil results. No one nation has a monopoly of all the fine quaUties of humanity. The world would be far poorer if the distinctive quahties of the best French, English, and Itahan life were all destroyed, or at least vastly impaired by the Germanizing of collective Europe. In the present unsatisfactory condition of the world, war, or at least readiness for war, appears to be really necessary, if aU the best elements and varieties of distinctive national Life are to be preserved. It is eminently undesirable that one country should practically swallow all the others ; and so the duty of self-defence against active aggression is manifest enough. And in our ordinary daily Ufe as individuals it 90 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy seems clear that Tolstoy's teaching cannot alwayw be carried into practice with good results. If the Russian moraUst had seen a ruffian horribly ill- treating a child, a woman, or a weak and defence- less old man, one feels quite sure that he would have used force on that occasion, in violation of the strict letter of his own ethical code of laws. Premature wisdom sometimes leads to practical foUy. With regard to the feeling called anger, Tolstoy's views appear to be not only exaggerated, but also to a great extent false and misleading. Probably his own passionate temperament caused him to see only the bad or injurious side of that state of mind. His teaching would have been far more well- balanced and satisfactory if he had read and digested the wise discourses of Bishop Butler about Resentment and the Forgiveness of Injuries. Butler clearly perceived what the Russian moralist failed to perceive, viz., that the feehngs called anger and resentment have a real and legitimate place in the economy of human life. The world in general does perceive this fact — Christ is all the dearer to us because of His anger against the 91 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy hypocrisy, tyranny, and cruelty of the Pharisees. When condemning anger itself as wrong in all circumstances, Tolstoy spoke unadvisedly and without adequate thought. What he really in- tended to condemn was undiscriminating anger — the anger that is a kind of temporary madness, the anger which only sees one side of a quarrel, the anger that makes no allowance for an opponent, the unchristian anger which quite ignores the abiding and universal duty of compassion. As Butler thought, St Paul certainly made a distinc- tion between wise anger and sin, when he gave us the precept, "Be ye angry, and sin not," which practically means, " Though ye be angry, sin not." The wise Bishop of Durham considered that all our distinctively human tendencies or quahties have a real meaning and value, whereas the Russian ascetic wished to extirpate or at least to suppress some of them. The abuse of a thing or a faculty does not prove that it has no use if dealt with thoughtfully. Butler expressed his opinion on this subject in these calm and deUberate words: "We should learn to be cautious, lest we charge God foolishly by 92 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy ascribing that to Him, or to the nature He has given us, which is owing wholly to our own abuse of it. . . . Human nature, considered as the divine workmanship, should, methinks, be treated as sacred, for in the image of God made He m^n. That passion from which men take occasion to run into the dreadful vices of malice and revenge, even that passion, as implanted in our nature by God, is not only innocent, but a generous move- ment of mind." Tolstoy apparently failed to understand the innate generosity and nobleness of the highest kinds of anger. Christ was never angry about injuries done to Himself, but often angry about injuries done to God's creatures by their fellow-men. Butler clearly perceived that compassion is mingled with the best form of anger. He wrote thus: " Though injury, injustice, oppression, the baseness of ingratitude, are the natural objects of ind' 'nation, or if you please of resentment, as before explained, yet they are likewise the objects of compassion, as they are their own punishment, and without repentance will for ever be so. No one ever did a designed injurj^ to another, but at 93 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy the same time he did a much greater to himself. If therefore we would consider things justly, such an one is, according to the natural course of our affections, an object of compassion as well as of displeasure; and to be affected really in this maimer, I say really in opposition to show and pretence, argues the true greatness of mind. We have an example of forgiveness in this way in its utmost perfection, and which indeed includes in it all that is good, in that prayer of our blessed Saviour on the cross : ' Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' " It is not quite easy to understand very exactly what the real teaching of Christ and of His apostles was essentially with regard to non-resistance to evil. Tolstoy's demands were to a very great extent based on this famous passage in the Sermon on the Mount: " Ye have heard that it hath been said. Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy — but I say unto you. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you." And the Russian morahst considered that his ethical demands received even 94 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy more explicit sanction from these other words used by Jesus on the same occasion: " Yo have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And, if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And who- soever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain." This teaching certainly seems quite plain, and there can be no reasonable doubt that Christ really wished His disciples to show forth to the world the wonderful powers of meekness, gentleness, self- eflFacement, and forgiving pity and love. Per- haps Jesus may have considered that there were some special reasons, at that stage of the world's development, for displaying the invincible and attractive might of the gentler quahties of man's nature. Both the Jews and the Romans at that period were mostly hard in their characters, and were behevers in force. So it may be that our Lord desired to show them the superior efficacy of reasonableness, pity, and love. He said that His 95 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy kingdom was not of this world ; but He declared plainly that He had come to found a far greater, wider, and more enduring kingdom than any then in existence. Probably He thought it necessary that the hard world should be startled out of ita old inveterate belief in force or violence. Thus only could it be led on to higher things. Moreover, it is manifest that the only powers then available, by which Christianity could hope to sub- due the coarse forcefulness of the surrounding world, were to be found in the highest passive quahties of our nature. At that period it certainly seemed, judging by the results, that God had chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong. Christ wished to introduce a partially new and most potent element into the higher life of man. He knew that Love would eventually con- quer the world, that it would achieve wondrous results, which neither the exclusive wisdom of the Greeks nor the stern practical force and energy of the Romans had been able to achieve. Force had been found to be no adequate remedy for the woes of mankind. Henceforth sympathy and love were to be tried. And so perhaps, in order to startle 96 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy men out of their old erroneous convictions, Jesus purposely put His new truth into extreme and ap- parently paradoxical forms. In this way, He ap- pears to have startled and for the moment almost repelled Nicodemus, coming to Him as to a con- ventional teacher of a very superior sort. And who shall venture to say that the magni- ficent confidence of Jesus in the ultimate triumph of the gentler quaUties of our complex nature was misplaced or ungrounded? Christ let loose a mighty force hitherto sore let and fettered in its earher courses. And that force eventually sub- dued the obstinate world, and even now has many glorious victories in store for it. The wonderful patience, the grand fidelity, the inexhaustible tenderness and compassion, the all-embracing and all-forgiving love of our Lord's earUer disciples must, in the very nature of things, have sometimes stirred the hearts of persecutors down in their very depths. Jesus and His followers gave to many of their enemies a new, truer, and more adequate revelation of the significance of their own inner faculties. The very strangeness of Christianity, its completely unearthly nature, must in itself F 97 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- have been to many a suggestion of the advent of a new power into human Ufe. Men now began to see a real glory in what was commonly reckoned shame. The cross of ignominy became a veritable theophany. The subhme seemed almost to pour contempt over ordinary utilitarian virtues. Heroism, forsaking the active virtues, seemed to concentrate itseK in the passive ones. The whole ethical world and its principles of valuation seemed now to be turned upside down, and men mar- velled at its unwonted condition. Yet the strange- ness of Christianity had something of native home- liness in it after aU. It appealed to rich though disused faculties in its adversaries. And these disused and almost atrophied faculties on some occasions insisted on fraternizing with their nominal enemy. Legal authority might crucify Christ as a malefactor, but it could not prevent men from sympathizing with Him. In that dark- est hour in the whole history of this sorrow-laden planet, the invincible and God-like meekness and love of Jesus were even then beginning their pre- destined triumph, and the secret inner thoughts of many hearts were at once unexpectedly and 98 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy startling ly revealed, when the Roman centurion and his companions cried aloud, with irrepressible and perhaps almost unwelcome conviction, " Truly this was the Son of God." Then indeed the Eternal Pity, incarnate in the noble heart of the great Gahlean, had begun to conquer. When Jesus, amidst His own horrible agonies, ministered tenderiy to the repentant thief, and still more when He cried, " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," the old ethics of paganism were shaken down to their very foun- dations. Then began a new stage in the ethical and spiritual development of human life. The Roman centurion, and perhaps many other igno- rant souls that witnessed the sufferings of Christ, became then a kind of advanced guard in that kingdom of sympathy which Tolstoy loved so well. Christ did not forbid in His followers every kind of appeal to collective authority. The church or the congregation was practically to take the place of the forbidden courts of ordinary secular law. And thus a very real check was found for that extreme and lawless individuahsra which Tolstoy seems to have admired. The teaching of St Paul 99 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- was also in the same direction as that of His divine Master on this subject. He thought that Chris- tians might rightly lay their grievances before a tribunal composed of their brethren, but that they ought not to lay them before unbeUevers. He held that fellow-Christians were specially suited to judge concerning such grievances. He said: " Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world; and, if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters? " The apostle thought that Christians ought to be wiUing to suffer wrong at the hands of their brethren rather than to bring discredit on their reUgion by appealing to unbelievers. He said, " Now, therefore, there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? Why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded? " This advice given to his Corinthian converts by St Paul would not be entirely pleasing to Tolstoy. The disciples of Christ appear to have learnt the lessons of their Master on this subject quite ac- curately. St John, the beloved disciple, evidently had his whole soul saturated with the universal IOC Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy and penetrating benignity of liis great leader and friend. The following sentences in his first Epistle make this manifest enough: " Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everj- one that loveth is bom of God and knoweth Grod. He that lovethnot, knoweth not God; for God is love. . . . Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. ... If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a har; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? . . . . We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. . . . Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." No one who studies the writings of St John can possibly doubt that the apostle beheved firmly and with his whole soul in the constraining power of love, and in its vast superiority to force, harshness, or violence as an ethical and spiritual regenerating agency. This most benignant spirit knew well the marvellous attracting and uplifting power of genuine sympathy. He knew that only love can produce or evoke love. He disclosed to lOI Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy us the whole rationale of spiritual persuasiveness and converting power when he declared, " We love Him, because He first loved us." What St John here said concerning God's method of attracting His creatures to HimseK, is just as true when ap- pUed to the methods by which the soul of one human being draws another soul to itseK. Sym- pathy or love is the true magnet for attracting stubborn hearts. The beloved disciple and the Russian morahst were completely in harmony on this matter. Both ahke realized the truth that force is no remedy in the ethical and spiritual world. St Peter also knew the mind of his much-loved Master on this important subject. In his earUer and harsher days he had to some extent beheved in violence ; but he had been reproved by his great leader, and had been taught that the best interests of rehgion cannot be served by the sword of earthly force. His mind was for ever haunted by the words of Jesus when He thus warned him : " Put up again thy sword into his place ; for all that take the sword shall perish with the sword." Perhaps this warning means that force or violence spends 102 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy all its energies quickly, and then passes away, whereas gentleness and sympathetic persuasion exercise an abiding and ever-increasing influence over the spirits of men. In one passage contained in his first Epistle, St Peter speaks as if he were so impressed by the might of gentle and unresisting goodness as to suppose, like Tolstoy, that it would always, or at least usually, be safe from violence or harm. The following words might well have been written by the Russian advocate of complete non-resistance to evil: " And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good? But then, as if correcting that statement as rather too optimistic, the apostle goes on to say, " But and if ye suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are ye, and be not afraid of their terror^ neither be troubled." Our Lord's apostles were very far from agreeing with Tolstoy in his repudiation of all external authority or ordinances. St Pet^r says plainly. " Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether it be to the king as supreme, or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evil-doers, 103 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy and for the praise of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well-doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of fooHsh men." Nor did this apostle think that there ought to be no servants, as Tolstoy thought. He says, " Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the fro ward." It is evident that Tolstoy must have used his own expurgated version of the Bible. What, we wonder, did our Lord mean when, at the very end of His career, as related by St Luke, He bid His followers provide themselves with swords? How can we reconcile this with the re- proof of St Peter for using his sword? Both these apparently irreconcilable injunctions are said to have been given at about the same time, at the end of Christ's Hfe on earth. " He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one." Perhaps the best approximation to a solution of this diffi- culty is to suppose that Jesus did not wish Himself to be personally protected by earthly force or violence, whilst He was yet wiUing that, in time of persecution, His disciples should for a time protect themselves by swords. If they had all been killed, 104 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- there would have been none left to carry on the work begun by the Master. So, perhaps, the use of force, though liabitualhj undesirable or wTong, might be considered expedient and right during the special dangers which our Lord perceived to be threatening His followers. As we have seen already, even the exaggerated teaching of Tolstoy is practically compelled to allow occasional ex- ceptions with regard to the carrying out of its extremely exacting rules. St James was to a great extent in harmony with the teaching of the Russian moralist as to force or violence. He exhorts his followers to be " slow to wrath," and declares that " the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God." He also shared to a great extent what we may call the humanitarian RadicaKsm of Tolstoy. He said, " My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect to persons. For, if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment, and ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him. Sit thou here in a good place, I OS Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy and say to the poor, Stand thou here, or sit here under my footstool, are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts? Hath not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He hath promised to them that love Him? " St James also agreed with the Russian teacher with regard to swearing. He wrote thus: " But, above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by Heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath." St Paul also preached that religion of gentleness and conciHation which Tolstoy so fervently ad- vocated. And his doing this is all the more re- markable, because his own natural temperament was rather imperious, self-asserting, and domineer- ing. He insisted on his rights as a Roman citizen, and at times he could speak with much personal bitterness towards his opponents. Yet he gradu- ally learnt the gentleness and sweet reasonable- ness of his divine Master. In his writings he was always inculcating meekness, as if he " did smart- ingly feel " his own deficiencies. He said, " I beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of 1 06 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Clirist." Wlieri writing to the Galatians, he de- clared that " the fruit of the spirit is love, jo_> , peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." And he besought his Ephesian followers to " walk worthy of the voca- tion wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love." Nor was he willing that any harshness should be used towards weak souls that erred. He says to the Galatians, " Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meek- ness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." This naturally impetuous and forceful leader had no belief in violence as a remedy for moral and spiritual weakness. He expressed, for all time, the habitual thoughts of the wisest Christians when he declared that " the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through Grod to the pulhng down of strongholds." It would have been well for the Roman CathoHc Church, as also for many other churches, if these wise 107 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy and pregnant words had been thoroughly under- stood and appreciated in their full and far-reach- ing significance. The history of Christianity would then have been far other than it has actually been. Tolstoy's noble and sympathetic soul was pene- trated by this Pauline teaching. The apostle's natural fieriness of disposition was turned into ardent and tender sympathy by the wondrous in- fluence of Jesus. And thus, ' ' Out of the eater come forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness." The persecutor became a veritable incarnation of the most clinging pity and compre- hending sympathy, so that he cried to his converts, " Who is weak, and I am not weak? " " I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren." He ever sought to allure men to goodness rather than to frighten them out of their sins. Admiration for Jesus, and not fear of hell, was his habitual animating motive. So he truly said of himself and his most real followers, " The love of Christ constraineth us." That indeed was a kind of constraint which the intensely individual- istic and lawless heart of the Russian morahst would ever welcome and love. Had Tolstoy stood 1 08 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy near St Paul when ho put forth his glorious poem of all-embracing charity or sympathy, given to the world in his thirteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, the ardent and most loving spirit of the noble Russian would have been quite ready to exclaim, " This is the song, the immortal song that the Lord Almighty loves." Yet in some other ways the Russian moraUst was not in agreement with the teaching of the apostle to the Gentiles. The following verses in St Paul's Epistle to the Romans would not have pleased him: " Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God. Who- soever, therefore, resisted the power, resisteth the ordinance of God, and they that resist shall receive to themselves condemnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil." Nor did the apostle agree with Tolstoy in holding that men ought not to pay taxes to the government. He said, " For this cause pay ye tribute also; for they are Grod's ministers." St Paul was a great organizer or administrator. And 80 he knew the value of regularity and dis- 109 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy cipline which Tolstoy did not know. No stnig- ghng and persecuted church could have been held together by the methods of the Russian thinker. On the whole, perhaps, we may sum up matters by saying that Christ and His earher followers were entirely in agreement with Tolstoy as to the utter futihty of force as a regenerating spiritual agent, but in direct conflict with him as regards orderUness, disciphne, obedience, and organization. They clearly recognized the truth that, though each member of the spiritual body has its own proper function, it is necessary that each member should systematically co-operate with the others, and not set itself up as a separate entity. They knew well that the branch cannot bear fruit except it abide in the vine. With regard to the Old Testament, of course we could not well expect to find such a clear and full revelation of the rehgion of love and sympathy as we find in the New Testament. Many of its pre- cepts were given to men temporarily, because of the hardness of their hearts. They were not exact transcripts of the eternal verities of the spiritual world. Christ evidently thought that the Jewish no Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy laws were far too stem and unforgiving. Ho would not have approved of the wholesale mass- acres of enemies in time of war. When Samuel hewed Agag in pieces, he was not acting in accord- ance with the highest eternal moral laws. The book of Leviticus breathes a fierce spirit completely out of harmony with Christianity. What Dr Martineau called the terrific volleys of curses in the book of Deuteronomy were as alien from the mind of Jesus as they are from that of Tolstoy. The earher Jewish literature reveals to us a bellicose hardness, excusable in a people that was obhged to fight for its existence, but by no means admir- able in itseK. Yet we are told that " the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth." And it is manifest that gentleness was not entirely wanting in the domestic Hfe of the Israehtes. The Psalms are full of blessings of the meek. One great part of Israel's mission was to show to the world the strength of weakness, the abiding power of a gentle passiveness. The famous fifty-third chapter of Isaiah describes the mission of Israel amongst the nations of the world. Ill Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Gazing on the persecuted and often helpless Jew, and reaUzing his mission to enrich the ethical and spiritual world by sorrow and suffering, the intel- lectual and joyous Greek and the stern and strong Roman might well exclaim, "He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows ; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our ini- quities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed." Moreover, the Hebrew prophets were at times filled with a spirit of wide-hearted sympathy, or philanthropy, greatly resembhng that of Tolstoy. These detached, thoughtful, and observant souls perceived clearly enough that the harshness of Judaism was destined to be superseded by a gentler and nobler reUgion. In the book of Job the ethics of the eternal world are represented as triumphing over the transitional ethics of ordinary- Judaism. The formulas of the current orthodoxy 112 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy are shown to be quite inadequate to meet the exigencies of fresh and strange experiences of actual Hfe. Like the Psalmists, the prophets looked forward to a coming day when tenderness should infuse itself into moral severity, when men should be able to declare that " Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." Amongst the greatest souls in Israel there appears to have been a deep longing for peace and the cessation of strife. They looked forward to a time in which they should be able to declare concerning their God, " He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth ; He breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; He burneth the chariot in the fire." Tolstoy's favourite doctrine of the essential brotherhood of man as man was not wholly un- known to the finer spirits amongst the Israehtes. Sometimes they gave a kindly and unsectarian glance to the needs of the Gentile world. And so one of them spoke thus of the coming admission of foreigners to the spiritual privileges of Israel : " And the Gentiles shall come to thy Ught, and kings to the brightness of thy rising." The G 113 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy broadest minds amongst the prophets looked for a day when the Gentiles should realize their outcast condition and seek initiation into the spiritual knowledge of the chosen people. Then might these benighted ones cry yearningly to the Eternal Pity, as the souls of so many outcasts and heretics have cried throughout the ages, " Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not." Amongst their own people, at all events, the best Jewish moral teachers manifestly disap- proved of universal and unending strife and com- petition, and longed for sympathetic co-operation. And so Isaiah wrote concerning a happy phase of the national life, " They helped everyone his neigh- bour, and everyone said to his brother. Be of good courage. So the carpenter encouraged the gold- smith, and he that smootheth with the hammer him that smote the anvil." And the same prophet declared plainly that the essence of true reHgion consisted in pity and benevolence, and not in any external ceremonies. He wrote thus to those who over-valued the mere rind of religion: "Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to loose the bands 114 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? \Mien thou seest the naked, that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh." There is much Tolstoyan religion in this famous passage. The incipient humanitarianism and universal sympathy, for so long to a great extent only latent in Jewish religion, find their most explicit manifestation in these words of the Prophet Malachi, words which had perhaps a far wider range of appUcation than the speaker was aware of: " Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother? " These ancient words might almost have been addressed by the modem Russian prophet to his own people and to the world collectively. They give expression to the very essence of Tolstoy's religion. They are quite 'peculiarly suited to set forth his most char- acteristic ethical teaching, and also what he con- ceived to be its indispensable religious foundation. 115 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy In his book called The Kingdom of God is within You, the Russian moralist explains that his ethical and rehgious teaching is radically different from that of Positivists and secular humanitarians. It postulates the Fatherhood of God as an indis- pensably necessary foundation for the true brotherhood of man. Tolstoy denies that we can love humanity apart from God. He says " The Christian doctrine, and the doctrine of the Positi- vists, and of all advocates of the universal brother- hood of man, founded on the utility of such a brotherhood, have nothing in common, and especi- ally do they differ in that the doctrine of Christian- ity has a sohd and a clearly-defined foundation in the human soul, whereas love of humanity is but a theoretical conclusion reached through analogy." r.. He also declared that " The Christian doctrine teaches the man that the essence of his soul is love ; that his well-being may be traced, not to the fact that he loves this object or that one, but to the fact that he loves the principle of all things — God, whom he recognizes in himself through love, and wiU by the love of God iove all men and all things." Tolstoy here writes as a confirmed mystic, as a ii6 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy kind of " God-intoxicated " teacher, or as a kind of Malebranche in the ethical world. Male- branche, the philosopher, thought that we see all things in God : Tolstoy thought that we ought to feel and love all things in God. Curiously enough, we find that Goldwin Smith, writing from an utterly agnostic point of view, agrees with the Russian moralist in thinking it very questionable whether the brotherhood of man is a real and soUd fact apart from all re- ligious ideas. He expressed his doubts on this subject in his interesting book called Guesses at the Riddle of Existence. On the other hand, George Eliot appeared to beheve that in a godless world, wherein men should feel that they are orphans and devoid of all hope of a future Ufe, the finest souls might feel an increased sense of brotherhood, a deeper pity and love for their sorrowful fellows. Perhaps this might be so for a time ; but we are convinced that in the end hopelessness would cause a sort of emotional apathy which would necessarily tend to lessen the keenness of sympathy. In a certain sense we beheve that Tolstoy was right, though not quite in the way that he understood 117 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy matters. Faith in God, as the undying source of all love, does greatly tend to vivify and invigorate our love for His creatures. Increased ho'pe for our fellows does tend to bring with it increased ad- miration, sympathy, and love for them. Men viewed as the sons of God destined to unending moral and spiritual progress are certainly more interesting and more worth Hving for than men viewed as the products of chance with no abiding spiritual significance. We cannot love animals as we love souls. In his later mystical stage of development Tol- stoy appears to be far too much inchned to despise the day of small things. Having chmbed up to a great height, he looks down rather too disdainfully on the ordinary plains of the moral and spiritual world. He was much less wise than St John, who clearly recognized the truth that, for all ordinary people, love for man whom we have seen is de- veloped earlier than love for God whom we have not seen. The book called The Kingdom of God is withiti You was written v^hen the Russian teacher was far advanced in rather unintelligible mysticism. It ii8 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy seems to contradict flatly what has been said in this essay as to his earher views with regard to the true method of arriving at well-grounded religious faith. He now seems to repudiate entirely that undeveloped Pragmatism which, consciously or unconsciously, guided his mind at an earher stage. Having started from the instinct to live and to find a meaning in life, our philosopher now destroys the stepping-stones which he found so useful in former years, and, standing on a supposed moun- tain of vision, bids strugghng pilgrims take to themselves wings and fly up to him in the rarefied air. Having, as he thought, found Grod, he pro- ceeded to depreciate man and his more ordinary faculties, just as Carlyle very unfairly sought to humihate man by comparing him with God. Mysticism certainly tended to diminish philan- thropy in the mind of the Russian morahst, or, at all events, to impair its inner nature. Men hke to be loved jor their own salces. ^ Tolstoy in his later years seemed to be wilHng to love them only for the sake of God. The underlying philosophy of this partially dehumanizing mysticism is really a mis- leading one. God is not jealous. He is quite willing 119 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy that we should gradually learn to love His supreme and concentrated spiritual glory by first loving its reflection in the works of Nature and in the souls of His creatures. Tolstoy's later mysticism seems in some ways almost like the old Calvinism, which opposed love for the creature to love for the Creator, as if the works of God were in no degree expressive of His real mind and character. This view seems to us both false and rehgiously injurious. It cannot be deemed really rational. If God purposely incarnated a very large portion of His ethical and spiritual nature in the person of Christ as a human being, it does not seem Hkely that He wishes us to ignore His peqDctual incarna- tion, to a less extent, in the noblest souls of the human race. Amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans we do not find much in harmony with Tolstoy's teaching as to complete non-resistance to evil — though an ancient sage declared that 2^«^c?ow is often more remedial than punishment. The Romans in the old days were essentially believers in force and regularity. And amongst the Greeks humility and gentleness were reckoned amongst the lower 120 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy virtues. Yet some of the old Stoics here and there in their teaching remind us a Uttle of the Russian reformer. Perhaps also the marvellous and admir- able friendships amongst the Greeks helped to cultivate gentleness, tenderness, and self-effacement to a considerable extent. It is also clear that Plato appreciated these softer and milder quaUties of human nature. He tells us that the gaoler who had charge of Socrates in his last hours was greatly- touched by the extreme gentleness of his prisoner. And in his great dialogue called the " Republic," Socrates is represented as steadfastly opposing the rough and violent Thrasymachus who contended that might is right, and that the strong are entitled to oppress the weak. In the portrait which Plato gives us of Socrates, calmness, serenity, and what Matthew Arnold called sweet reasonableness are very striking features. Even in arguments he was much opposed to anything like blustering or bullying. On the other hand, it is tolerably plain that Aris- totle did not really much care for meekness. The proud strut of his "high-minded" man would be far more pleasing to Nietzsche than to Tolstoy. 121 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- Coming now to what we may vaguely call the middle ages of the world's history, it seems at first sight as if there was almost nothing at that time in harmony with Tolstoy's views as to meekness and absolute non-resistance. But a more careful in- spection of the best thought and practice of that period discloses to us some faint indications of a coming kingdom of gentleness, sympathy, and love. Even during the almost complete reign of violence, the feehngs and the institutions of what was called chivalry offered a kind of protest against the ab- solute and unrestrained dominance of brute force. To some extent it was even then recognized that the strong have obUgations to the weak. The old maxim that " Noblesse oblige " shows this. Aristo- crats are often far more friendly to the lower class than many of our modern plutocrats. Gentleman- liness, as an ideal, certainly has in it some valuable ethical elements which we do not always find amongst the rich middle class. It implies much consideration for those beneath one and a kind of refined shrinking from hurting their feelings. Moreover, it is evident that the great Catholic Church, though in some ways cruel and persecuting, 122 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy really did a good deal to promote pity, gentleness, and tenderness. It preached self-restraint, love for the poor and suffenng, and also self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of benevolence. Tme monks were obliged to be humble. Probably self- effacement was scarcely ever learnt more thor- oughly than it was by some devout Catholics in the Middle Ages. The souls of Thomas a Kempis and of St Francis of Assisi were in some wa3^s very near to the soul of Christ. The beautiful humihty of the former and the radiant geniality and all- embracing tenderness of the latter offer us a strong and most pleasing contrast to the violence of the lay world and the fierce intolerance of the ordinary clerical world. Even in the case of the bitter and scornful Dante, some exquisite passages of pitying tenderness in his Purgatorio do a great deal to counteract the harsh and abominable horrors of his Inferno. The divine love did not leave itself entirely unrepresented even during the long reign of violence and force. The worship of the Virgin Mary also helped greatly to mitigate the harshness of that age- Christ had then been almost dehumanized. The 123 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy stem Judge had taken the place of the Good Shep- herd in the regnant theology of the time . But men worshipped pity, tenderness, mildness, and mercy as incarnate in the Mother of Christ. The worship of the Virgin Mary was an ethical and spiritual necessity in those days of violent forcefulness and cruelty. Only thus could the best and most vitally characteristic elements of the rehgion of Jesus be preserved. Coming down to a later age, we find ordinary Protestantism very deficient in the best elements of Tolstoy's religion. As Dr Edward Caird (the Master of BalUol) wisely remarked, " Protestantism has been for the most part a Judaized Christian- ity, whilst Catholicism has been for the most part a paganized Christianity." In many ways Cal- vinism was harsher and more inhuman than CathoHcism. The Elect were reckoned by it as the only really important people in the world. The non-elect were mere dross. The division between these two classes of men was as harsh as the old division between Greeks and barbarians. Un- doubtedly Calvinism had some advantages for the moulding of human character. It made men 124 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy strong, self-reliant, confident, and energetic, but it inevitably tended to wither the softer and gentler feelings of humanity. A stern conception of God produced stern men. Tolstoy would have de- tested Calvin, both for his bad quaUties and for his good ones. However, in some cases, the original fineness and tenderness of men's souls preserved their gentleness and mildness, notwithstanding the hardening influence of their formal creeds. The saintly Archbishop Leighton, Calvinist though he was to some extent, would have charmed the heart of Tolstoy. Concerning him it was said that his rebukes were so gentle to his servants when they did wrong, that they seldom repeated their offences, not because they were afraid to do so, but because they were ashamed to do so. The Quakers also anticipated much of Tolstoy's teaching. In modem times we meet with many widely- scattered fore-gleams of Tolstoyan religion in many varied departments of life. These early gleams of pity and tenderness were often found even amongst the horrors of war. Tolstoyan ethics 125 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- were sometimes found exercising a real influence even amidst the fiercest strife. In long wars men appear to have felt instinctively that there must be interludes of brotherhood and almost of per- sonal affection. And so WeUington's soldiers often fraternized with French soldiers in a quite marvellous way. The hostile officers were often courteous and friendly to each other. And, even in that Division in which discipline was most sternly enforced — even in the celebrated Light Division — the private soldiers often took the liberty of making temporary comrades or friends of French soldiers. During a temporary cessation of hos- tiUties in the Peninsular War, a soldier of the 95th Rifles thus describes the way in which nomin- ally hostile soldiers fraternized with each other: " All this time, and for a great part of that in which we were quartered here, a very friendly intercourse was carried on between the French and ourselves. We frequently met them bathing in the Rio Mayor, and would as often have swimming and even jumping matches. In these games, how- ever, we mostly beat them; but that was attri- buted perhaps to their half-starved and distressed 126 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy condition. This our stolen intercourse soon made us aware of, until at length, touched with pity, our men went so far as to share with them the ration biscuits which we were regularly suppUed with from England. Indeed we buried all national hostihty in our anxiety to assist and relieve them. Tobacco was in great request; we used to carry some of ours to them, while they in return would bring us a httle brandy," This narrative would have cheered the heart of the Russian reformer. Even in those old days, when the punishments inflicted on soldiers were almost incredibly severe, when a sentence of five hundred lashes was quite an ordinary one, the greater officers to a consider- able extent realized the truth that force is not an entirely adequate remedy for disobedience and lawlessness. And so Sir John Moore made many appeals to the men's sense of patriotism and to their better feelings in general. And many other officers followed the example of Moore. On one occasion that excellent officer. Sir WiUiam Napier, acted towards one of his men in a way that Tolstoy would have greatly admired. A rather law-less and 127 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy wild Irish private had been sentenced to receive a great number of lashes, but Napier let him off, partly because a battle was then imminent, and still more because he thought that the erring man had some fine quahties. When the battle came on, Napier tells us that this wild soldier showed his gratitude by perpetually thrusting his own huge body between his forgiving officer and the bullets of the enemy. And so it is evident enough that this Tolstoyan mildness of Sir William Napier was wise and amply justified. Yet, long after the Peninsular War, the colder-hearted Wellington was not ashamed to declare that he had not much hope of any improvement in the character of the British soldier except from his fear of corporal punish- ment. At the end of his marvellous career, the great Napoleon seems to have been struck with a feeling of the superiority of moral force to that of physical in securing 'permanent influence over mankind. In the soUtude of his imprisonment and in view of death, he is said to have freely expressed his opinion on this subject. He said that he had been accustomed to put before himself the examples of 128 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Alexander and Caesar, but that he now perceived how extremely shght was the mark that they had left on the world, when compared with the abiding and most penetrating influence of Christ. Napoleon's final conclusion was that Christ must be a divine being, and not merely a man. Per- haps, even then, the great earthly warrior scarcely understood one of the chief sources of the abiding influence of Jesus. Perhaps he did not quite adequately realize the fact that his own empire, like those of Alexander and Caesar, had been founded almost entirely on violence, whereas the empire of Jesus was founded on reason, persuasion, sympathy, and love. The followers of Christ dis- played an absolutely unswerving loyalty to their master, which the followers of Napoleon did not always show. In his Grammar of Assent, Cardinal Newman gives us a quite marvellous account of the strange alacrity and even joy with which the Christian martyrs welcomed the most horrible torments for the sake of the Lord whom they loved. Assuredly Newman was right in consider- ing Gibbon's reasons to account for the spread of Christianity very inadequate. That historian H 1 29 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- knew not the almost incredible might of the noblest human devotion and love. Tolstoy would not agree with Napoleon as to the divine nature of Christ. It seems rather strange that the less the Russian thinker beUeved in the divinity of Jesus, the more he beheved in His moral infallibiUty. He stripped Christ of very much that was supposed to constitute His authority, and yet he demanded from men the most exact and literal obedience to every jot and tittle of His ethical precepts. But in some ways he seemed to care more for the teaching than for the Master who gave that teaching. Nor did he scruple to ignore other large portions of the doctrines of Christ which were not directly con- nected with the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, we might almost say that he only followed Christ when his teaching appeared to be an anticipation of Tolstoyan wisdom. He would not allow the divine Galilean to preach personal immortality, though to careful and unprejudiced students it is plain enough that this doctrine was an abso- lutely essential portion of His message to mankind. In his later years Tolstoy became quite bigoted 130 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy and unfair towards orthodoxy and towards any thing approaching to orthodoxy. In his book called The Kingdom of God is within You, he says : " The Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene Creed; the one excludes the other. If a man sincerely believes the Sermon on the Mount, the Nicene Creed must inevitably lose all its meaning for him." This oracular utterance is really ab- surd. Amongst other things, the Nicene Creed proclaims the Fatherhood of God, and that has a direct connection with the Sermon on the Mount, and is, according to Tolstoy himself, the indispensable foundation of the brotherhood of man. Here, as on many other occasions, the Russian philosopher speaks far too rashly and inaccurately. What he really meant to say prob- ably was that, if we accept the full significance of the Sermon on the Mount, we cannot consis- tently make acceptance of the Nicene Creed an indispensable condition of salvation. With this underl3nng meaning of Tolstoy all Uberal religious thinkers would agree, though they some of them value the Nicene Creed as teaching the spiritual union of Christ with God. m Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Tolstoy's opinion, that those who accept the Nicene Creed cannot really care for the Sermon on the Mount, is contradicted by facts, and it is about as absurd as the monstrous declaration of Cotter Morison, that " all Christians agree in viHpending a moral life." In both cases alike experience con- vinces us of the folly of the statement given to us. Did Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Frederick Denison Maurice, and Bishop Westcott care nothing for the Sermon on the Mount? Does Canon Scott Holland care nothing for it? Did the saintly Dr King, the late Bishop of Lincoln, entirely disregard it? No doubt this Bishop's rehgious opinions were very narrow in some re- spects ; but it is notorious that his heart was over- flowing with tenderness and the most Christ- like compassion for sinners and for the sufferings of mankind. Emotionally this gentle prelate was very near to Christ, though he did hold many untenable opinions on abstract questions. St Paul declared plainly that it is " with the heart that man belie veth unto righteousness." The only excuse that we can find for Tolstoy's narrow and bigoted teaching on this subject is 132 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy to bo found in the fact that his ideas as to ortho- dox or semi-orthodox Christianity were mostly derived from contemplation of the exceedingly corrupt and superstitious orthodox church in Russia. ^\lien apphed to the finer minds and souls in Great Britain, his remarks are at once seen to be ridiculous and very uncharitable. Finallv, we now come to the discussion of the question whether there are any indications in the present age of the coming triumph of Tolstoy's doctrine of complete non-resistance to evil. The prophet himself saw many significant signs of these, and to a great extent it really seems that he was right, and that Carlyle's moral methods of reforming men were wrong. We do not beheve that the principles of the Russian morahst will ever be completely triumphant in this world; but we do seem already to perceive many tokens of their coming partial victory. Let us proceed to look for these signs. In the first place, civiUzed nations do really appear to be learning to shrink from war, as they did not shrink in earfier ages. They are now willing to submit to arbitration some quarrels 133 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy or differences of opinion which would inevitably have led to war in former days. The immensely increased destructive power of modern weapons of war has caused men to realize more adequately what must be the horrors of war in our time. An increase of humanity has also caused most men to detest the unavoidable cruelty and sufferings of war. In this direction is to be found our chief ground for hopes of lasting peace in the world. The Sermon on the Mount has sunk down into men's hearts more effectively than it formerly did. During the last Boer War, when men were burying the dead of both the hostile armies, some of the Boer leaders expressed to an excellent British chaplain their deep sense of the incom- patibihty of war and its horrors with real Chris- tianity. This feehng seems likely to grow and spread throughout the Christian world. And it is very much needed ; for, strange to say, whilst humanity has really increased, the sense of honour and fairness between nations appears not to have increased at all. Whilst cruelty is now hated more than it used to be hated, treachery, on the part of one nation to another, seems to be 134 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- thought quite natural and ahnost justifiable. Men do not seem to be at all shocked at the pros- pect of one nominally Christian nation making a sudden and unprovoked attack on anotlier in time of profound peace and without any pre- liminary disputes. Turning now to our own domestic life, we seem to find many indications of belief that force or violence is not the most efficient means of pro- moting permanent welfare. Mad people are no longer treated wnth the old brutal and utterly stupid violence. Our ordinary laws in civilian life are far milder than in former days, and we perceive clearly that they are also more effective. In the army we have aboHshed the old habit of flogging soldiers, and we know that the discipline of the army is now far better than it was. In our prisons, also, we have abandoned to a great extent our old brutal methods. Charles Reade, the novelist, did a whole world of good by showing the utter futiUty of the old cruel way of deaUng with prisoners. But there is still much room for improvement in the management of our ^ftjs. Sohtary confinement is eminently calculated to 135 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy make offenders worse rather than better. The methods of mere repression are now being dis- credited. We are gradually learning that we cannot really improve the characters of sinners by tormenting them. Yet we still retain to some extent the abominable custom of depriving some prisoners of adequate sleep by refusing to allow them tolerably comfortable beds. This custom is more worthy of Chinese cruelty than of Christian wisdom. But, on the whole, the disciphne of our prisons is gradually becoming milder and more rational. We are slowly learning that it is unwise to treat men as brutes, if we wish to reform their char- acters. The wise ideas set forth in that noble story. It is Never too Late to Mend, are at last being generally received. We are beginning to perceive that considerate treatment and some measure of real sympathy are indispensably necessary as agents in moral regeneration. In- struction is slowly taking the place of irrational violence. Our gaols are to a considerable extent being turned into training schools, instead of remaining places for merely vindictive punish- 136 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy ment. We are beginning to recognize the trutli that we ought to aim at sending offenders out of prisons morally better than tliey were when they were cast into them. In education, also, the old violent methods are gradually being abandoned. We are beginning to perceive that beating boys is by no means the best way of educating them. Many thoughtful people now agree ^\'ith an eminent EngUsh states- man in holding that corporal punishments might very well be aboHshed in our schools. Boys in the army are generally managed without any corporal punishments. So it is difficult to see why boys in the upper and middle classes should need to be flogged. Many \nse people now feel strongly on this subject. The more we reflect, the more evident it appears that flogging ought to be given up in our schools. Great educators might well join with great reUgious teachers in declaring, " the weapons of our warfare are not carnal." In order that education may be of the best sort, in order that it may expand all the higher faculties of boys, and give them a real hking for things admirable and noble, a very large amount ^37 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy of personal sympathy between these teaching and those being taught seems absolutely necessary. Boys cannot be flogged into a real appreciation of the best hterature and the grandest heroism. Unquestionably they learn best from those whom they hke personally. And, in the case of the more sensitive boys, it seems almost impossible that they should feel sympathy and affection for masters who use violence towards them. In former days masters used to flog boys, in many cases, because they were too idle to take the trouble to persuade them. But it is now evident enough that persuasion is, in the long run, far more permanently effective than any kind of violence. The results of persuasion are lasting, whereas the results of irrational compulsion are essentially transient. ■^'' In the religious world it is still more evident that Tolstoyan ideas are becoming very much more prevalent than they were. And this fact is specially significant, because, when a man's rehgion is real, and not a mere form, it is a kind of summing up of his whole nature, a sort of condensed statement of his whole attitude to- U8 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy wards life and its meaning, witli all its joys and sorrows, and with all its various problems. If one truly knows what a man's real religion is, ono can to a great extent infer what his views must be as to poUtics, art, literature, friendship, and the general courses of human life. Now it certainly does seem quite clear that the mildness and gentleness of the Russian moralist have infused themselves into the best religion of our time. The most deeply spiritual natures of this age are far more genial and far mellower than almost any of those of earUer times. The God whom the wiser minds now worship is really, and no longer only nominally, a God of Love. The finest souls have banished the old nightmare horror of a cruel and vindictive Deity. They have discovered that he never existed indepen- dently, that he was but a hideous creation of men's own barbarity and cruelty. Gazing into the stem, unrelenting, and almost petrifying face of this appaUing phantom, the disciples of the real Jesus have dared to disparage its old futile method of overcoming the evil of human weakness by the still greater evil of irrational violence, and, 139 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy reproaching it for the utter failure imphed in its eternal and over-crowded hell, these gentle but intrepid souls have ventured to address to it the warning words of the great apostle to the Gentiles, " Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." Tolstoy was assuredly quite right in disparaging the old coarse religion of violence and fear. In their most inspired hours the best of the ancient Hebrew prophets perceived the transiency of the religion of terror. They knew that the Lord was not in the fierce wind or the earthquake of terror and alarm, but in the " still, small voice " of sympathetic persuasion and love. Their de- nunciations themselves were full of repressed tenderness. They were fine innuendoes as to the splendid potentiaUties of human nature. They were as a trumpet-call to a noble warfare. The apparent bitterness of the prophets was essentially the passing bitterness of disappointed and baffled appreciation and affection. They were ashamed of man, chiefly because they knew his possible greatness. Hence came their abrupt and often startlingly rapid changes from fierce storms of 140 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy apparently implacable reproach to bursts of the most chnging, impassioned, and inexhaustible love, as though the great eternal fountains of the divine tenderness had broken through all barriers, and now poured themselves irrepressibly into every corner of man's desolate and sorrowing life. The absoluteness and the unchanging nature of the divine love were at times manifested to the greater Hebrew prophets in all their grandeur and fulness. At times these prophets perceived a kind of sorrowful plaintiveness and reproachful- ness in the love of the Father, as if the Infinite Pity and Love scarcely cared to live without their children, as if they even then yearned to incarnate themselves in the good Shepherd who gave His life for the wandering sheep. The great Russian would have loved the best of the Hebrew prophets in their hours of lofty in- spiration. He would have been deHghted to see death and hell and vindictive anger swallowed up in the victory of the divine love. He would have fully appreciated the wise tenderness of words like these: "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you"; "Can a 141 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee"; "I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for mine anger is turned away from him. I will be as the dew unto Israel." Considering how the churches have perverted the messages of real religion, perhaps Tolstoy might have said that, though God wished to be as the dew unto all man's weak and struggling higher faculties, orthodox divines have often represented Him as a harsh, bitter, parching, and destroying east wind to those faculties. In reahty, the generosity of God is a far more effective means of saving men's souls than any amount of grudging severity. As St Paul de- clared, " The fooHshness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." The immortal parable of the Prodigal Son is full of suggestiveness and true spiritual and moral insight. And it is entirely in harmony with Tol- stoy's conception of religion. The weapons of the injured father were not forcible or carnal. 142 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy His weakness was his strength. The fact that the son knew his father's weakness, knew that he could not do without him, constituted the true strength of the father's position. Pathos pierces the hearts of thousands of sinners who are not much moved by threats or denunciations. Tlie love of Christ is a mightier regenerating power than the fear of hell. Full and free forgiveness touches the wilder sort of sinners more, and pene- trates more deeply into the secret recesses of their hearts, than any amount of rigidly just punish- ment. Hopefulness and loving gratitude lead to the very best sort of repentance. There are many who resist what they imagine to be the wrath of God, whilst they are yet incapable of resisting the pity of God. Age after age, sinful hearts might well express their inmost thoughts and feehngs in these old words of the prophet Micah: "Who is a God hke unto Thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the trans- gression of the remnant of His heritage? He re- taineth not His anger for ever, because He de- lighteth in mercy. He will turn again; He will have compassion upon us; He will subdue our 143 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy iniquities ; and Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea." Great indeed is the power of comprehending pity and wise interpretation to themselves of men's own hearts. In order to understand human nature, it is necessary first to sympathize with it. Men do not disclose their deepest inmost feelings to the harsh and the unsympathetic, so that, whilst love is working moral miracles, harshness or violence, whether regnant in religion or in the management of our ordinary prisons, is obliged to be content with failure, and to cry, in its old futile and despairing way, " He that is filthy, let him be filthy still." As the Bible declares, it is the " gentleness " of God which makes men great, and the gentleness of man is the most efficient co-operator with God in His divine work for the human race. Physicians of the soul might learn much wisdom from physicians of the body in this age. In physiology and medicine, as understood by the best practitioners, what we may call Tolstoyan ideas are now regnant. Wise doctors, when dealing with corporeal diseases, now seek to assist nature and not to thwart or suppress it. 144 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy And the best physicians of the soul are qjadually learning to act in a similar manner with moral and spiritual diseases. Neither bodies nor souls are usually now bled to death in the old violent way. We are discovering that sin often arises from sheer weakness of volitional energy, for which force is certainly no remedy. Tolstoy would have agreed cordially with Charles Kingsley who declared that the religion of terror is the most superficial of all reUgions. It makes men sorry that they are going to be punished, but not sorry for their own baseness and meanness. There is nothing admirable or even distinctively human in that sort of sorrow. Even dogs are sorry that they are going to be punished. And the eflEects of religious terror are essentially transitory. If the Russian moralist had known the best rehgious teaching in Great Britain, he would have gladly recognized the fact that the old rehgion of violence is rapidly being superseded by a re- ligion of reason and sympathy; and so his very- low opinion of the churches would have been much modified. In the Church of England, in the more I 145 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy- liberal Dissenting Cliurclies, and in the Scottish Established Church, and the United Free Church, the best minds have already renounced the old coarse religion of terror. The Sermon on the Mount — which was so dear to Tolstoy — together with the parable of the Prodigal Son, and of the Good Shepherd, and of the Good Samaritan, now constitutes the vital essence of the teaching of the more liberal thinkers in these churches. And this teaching is now congenial to the great majority of laymen of all classes. Simple people, no less than the highly-educated, now very much prefer this more genial religion. The appalling picture of future punishment given in Baxter's Sainfs Everlasting Rest would now utterly disgust the overwhelming majority of those who go to church, and so would some dreadful passages in Spurgeon's sermons. The best thinkers in the Church of England now find themselves completely out of harmony with the harsh curses of the Athanasian Creed, and with our thoroughly Judaic Commina- tion Service, which appears to teach that God cannot or will not show mercy and justice at the same time to the same people. And in Scotland 146 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy the most prominent thinkers and preachers now find much that they cannot entirely accept in their old Confession of Faith, In these days we also find that the religion of mildness, reasonableness, and sympathy is the only one that really suits simple and unlearned people. The writer of this essay has spent a veiy considerable portion of each year, during the last quarter of a century, in voluntarily helping various chaplains and acting chaplain to look aft^r soldiers and to preach to them. And he has invariably found that the rehgion of sympathy is the only one to which soldiers gladly hsten. They dislike intensely the old rehgion of threats. Sermons full of damnation simply repel them. Half- consciously or unconsciously they appear to argue in some such way as this: If the preacher tells us that we are going to suffer horrible torments for ever, he must think that we deserve such tor- ments; and, if we deserve such torments, he must think that we are very horrible fellows; and, if he thinks that we are very horrible fellows, he must dislike us; and, if he dislikes us, we do not care for him, and we are not going to listen to him. 147 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy Soldiers instinctively feel that the very severe and denunciatory preachers do not really under- stand them, and so that their warnings and advice are worthless. On the other hand, a very large number of soldiers listen both attentively and gladly to the advice of broad-minded and sym- pathetic preachers. The present writer once heard some of the men in a well-known cavalry regiment say to a preacher of that sort, " We do like hearing your sermons, for you always give us another chance, and you are never hard on us." A prominent Enghsh general once said that the sermons best suited to soldiers are those which contain plenty of sympathy and not too much doctrine. The advent of a milder and more sympathetic reUgion is sure to bring with it eventually a salu- tary change in men's ordinary daily life. The wiser teaching will gradually sink down into the thoughts and feelings of secular life. In our days the best, most human, and broadest religion offers a kind of unsectarian and hospitable temple, into which mer take their various moral ideaUsms, in order that they may be consecrated and 148 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy strengthened. All that is best and most valuable in daily Ufe finds new and strong inspiration in such temples. Wide-hearted benevolence, justice, sym- pathy, friendship, and affection are all quickened into fuller vitaUty by broad religion. This re- ligion breathes into them the power of an endless life. It infuses into their finiteness some of the life-blood of the Infinite. It touches to fine issues many glorious capacities hitherto dormant. It gives them a force of persistency and recupera- tion which they otherwise would not have. When men truly receive the reUgion of gentle- ness and sympathy, they will gradually learn to carry it out in their daily fives. And so men's ordinary existence will be greatly changed. The old distrust between different classes, now so widely prevalent, will gradually pass away. Working men now go on strike because they think that their employers are unjust to them. But when the time comes in which workmen will beheve that their employers are profoundly desirous to act fairly and sympathetically towards them, and in which employers will beheve that their workmen are filled with the same spirit of fairness and 149 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy sympathy, fierce disputes leading to strikes will cease. Co-operation, on a large scale and in varied forms, will then mitigate greatly the old horrible and selfish struggle for existence. Such co-opera- tion would naturally follow the reception of Tol- stoy's religion. The most real merit of the Russian reformer, as a thinker, is to be found in the fact that he perceived clearly that the course of merely physical evolution is well-nigh ended in this planet, and that the future is with moral evolution. Though Tolstoy was apt to exaggerate, he did see clearly the trend of the best modern thought. He also perceived what must be the 'power which could enable that thought to translate itself into efficient and permanent action. His vision into the nature and the wants of man was keen and penetrating. He saw that, at the present stage of man's long pilgrimage, a change of guides is necessary. He saw that merely natural selection was no longer adequate to secure progress. He saw that the seK-regarding struggle for existence had virtually done its work. He saw that the stern preparatory Baptist must make way for 150 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy the Messiah of gentleness. He perceived that selfishness had become folly, that, at the present stage of development, Grod has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong. The great Russian saw plainly the direction in which the best ethical thoughts and life of our age must move. But he was rather too impatient, and his precipitation might, in the long run, have very much retarded the progress that he desired. So long as there are tyrants and bullies in the world, it is necessary that they should be actively resisted. Even for their own sake these tyrants and bullies ought to be resisted. If not resisted, they would grow worse. It is only at a later stage of their development that meekness and gentle- ness would effectively appeal to them. They must be resisted first, and only afterwards in- structed in the way of God more perfectly. But we beheve that a day will come in which the tyrants and bullies of the world will, for the most part, have learnt the folly of their old coarse violence. And then at last the precepts of Tol- stoy can be almost universally carried out. We beUeve that soine evil and some violence will 151 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy always be found in this world ; but we also believe that they will be enormously reduced in amount, 80 that Tolstoy an saints will practically reign. We believe that these saints will never in this world find the true city of God in all its unstained moral splendour; but we also beheve that these aspiring pilgrims may hereafter approach very near to that true home of elect souls. We beheve that, even on earth, they may find the land of Beulah, or roam freely over the " delectable mountains," as they draw nigh to that blessed land. And, after all, we are compelled to own that it is to these aspiring, ambitious, and rather too sanguine spirits that the world owes the greatest debt. Theirs is the faith that removes mountains of difficulties, the faith that " overcomes the world " with all its stagnant inertness, all its timid despondency, and all its materialistic unbehef in the noblest moral ideals. It is because the prophets of God even now " behold the land that is very far off," that we weak ones obtain courage to follow them slowly in their triumphant career. Pioneers must be confident, or they could not do 152 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy their best work. Greathearts must to some extent underrate difficulties. Their immense, precocious, and almost excessive faith is needed to stimulate our faltering faith. A faith in the final and complete victory of goodness, such as was that of Browning and Tolstoy, is a great gift from God to His weaker children. And it is essentially grand and heroic. It is well worthy of the utmost admiration and love. It reminds one of the faith of that undaunted Roman who is said to have purchased at its full price a field of his country on which the aggressive and vic- torious Carthaginian hosts were then encamped. AU honour be to those great souls, which, even in the very darkest hour, face the forces of evil and cruelty with unflinching confidence and invincible courage. Let us hope that, in the spiritual world, the scarred soul of Leo Tolstoy may not be ultimus Romanorum. Let us hope that his mantle may fall on some genuine successors. Plato thought that a kind of subhme madness is often an indispensable condition of divine in- spiration. The spiritual vision of the greatest prophets is often confused, perplexing, and to 153 Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy some extent inconsistent or at least incoherent. Great religious teachers are possessed by certain elevated thoughts. Some noble ideal seems to speak to each of them as God is said to have spoken to Pharaoh, saying, " In very deed, for this cause have I raised thee up, for to show in thee My power." Necessity is laid upon them to preach a new gospel which they only partially comprehend. The minds of God-intoxicated thinkers often seem for a time ill-balanced. Yet are they the world's best regenerators. Leo Tolstoy might have said with St Paul, " Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God; or, whether we be sober, it is for your cause." IS4 THE PERSONALITY OF GOD n Perhaps it may be well to consider the objections made by some to our ascribing personality to God. In some of his moods Tolstoy appears to have sym- pathized with these objections, though in other moods he used language which certainly implies the divine personahty. The common objection is that personaUty impUes Umitation, whilst God can have no Hmita- tion. In one passage of his writings Tolstoy definitely sanctions this teaching. This argument seems to suggest that those who defend the doctrine of the personahty of God con- sider His personaUty to be just like ours, and also that they consider it an adequate description of Cxod. Both these suggestions are erroneous. No thoughtful person supposes that God's personahty is just hke ours. It must, in the nature of things, be widely diflferent from ours. What Theists 157 The Personality of God maintain is that God must have intellect, character, and will, though all these quahties are and must be very different in an infinite being from what they are in finite beings. If Spinoza, when deny- ing intellect to God, only meant that He has no intellect just like ours, we may well agree with him. But if he meant that God has nothing even faintly resembhng human intellect, we are compelled to differ from him. Herbert Spencer declared that it is absurd to attribute consciousness, intelhgence, or will to the Creator ; but all that he really proved is that these quahties cannot be just like the same quahties in us. A sort of modified Pantheism enables us to a great extent to answer Spencer's arguments. The immanence of God in the whole creation does away with many of the objections of our opponent. No seriality or hmitation is needed to constitute the divine intelligence, because this intelligence is diffused throughout the whole universe, at once filling it and transcending it. God is, as it were, the all-pervading soul of the universe. To Him there is no beginning and no ending. He is the basis of everything that exists. He is at once, in 158 The Personality of God some sense, the perceiver and the thing perceived. Probably the need for some aUen or external activity, to evoke distinct consciousness of per- sonality, is an infirmity of our finite nature, and not of the essence of conscious personahty as such. When we ascribe personahty to God, we are not attempting to give anything approaching to a full or adequate description of His Being. Nor do we care to fight over mere words. We believe that God is far more than we are able to conceive, " the nameless thought, the super-personal heart." But we refuse to believe that God can possibly be helow personahty or devoid of the best quaHties which we find in His creatures. We beheve that the highest things in man are faint adumbrations of eternal realities, " shadows of good things to come, and not the very images." All sane theories of the universe imply the Unknowable in the back- ground. Atheists cannot possibly escape from the inherent mysteriousness of the universe. The thick darkness of the primal mystery broods over all our provisional explanations. Yet we maintain that some of these explanations are more probable 159 The Personality of God and more approximately true than others. We cannot explain how God can have intellect, char- acter, and will ; but we still beHeve that, in some inconceivable way. He really has them. Critics Uke Matthew Arnold argue as if all the difficulties were on the side of Theism, and none on the side of Atheism or utter Agnosticism. But this way of arguing is extremely misleading. Atheists are compelled to be extremely credulous if they make any attempt to defend or explain their theories. They often seem powerful when attacking Theism; but they are extremely weak in defending their own proposed substitutes for Theism. Their theory imphes that the effect is greater than its own cause, that men are wiser and morally better than their Creator, that the universe has brought forth a son greater than itself. The miracles of Atheistic unbeHef are stupendous and quite incredible. Chance, as a cause, cannot bear the weight which Atheists put upon it. It is not a power at all, but only a name for our ignorance of causation. If mind is required to interpret the universe, it seems probable that mind was also required to construct or mould it ; and the fact that 1 60 The Personality of God this mind vastly transcends ours does not prove that it is not mind of soyne sort. All our philo- sophical and religious expressions and theories are confessedly provisional; but their being of this nature does not prove that they are value- less. Crutches are useful for weak people. The creeds of rational Theists are symbols, and not precise and exhaustive statements of facts of natural history. Atheists bluster when they are cross-examining Theists, but they themselves appear utterly fatuous when they are searchingly cross-examined. li God has nothing at all akin to what we call personahty, He can have no moral qualities at all. and He cannot be love. And so, as Bro^vning de- clared, He would be essentially inferior to many of His creatures. Surely this is a rediictio ad ahsurdum of those theories which deny personahty to the Creator. How can God give us what He does not possess Himself? Has the First Cause intelligence enough to be surprised and startled at its own productions? Whence came purpose into the universe if there was originally none in it? How came an idiot to beget a sage ? What is K t6i The Personality of God it that determines that things shall exist in one way, and not in another? If the universe is mad, how comes it that we are sane? Grant- ing that matter and force are eternal, we still inquire what is it that moulds and directs them. There is no such thing as chance, and, if there is no chance, one thinks that there must be purpose, and purpose impHes mind of some sort, and mind implies something akin to personaUty. Matthew Arnold seemed to suppose that, if they really beheved in God, Theists were bound to ex- plain to him just how God exists. But, of course, that supposition is absurd. Probably God knows how to exist in very many ways neither sanctioned nor understood by Matthew Arnold. In postulat- ing God's existence and personahty, we do not profess to explain all difficulties. We only say that, in doing this, our reason is following the line of least resistance. With regard to such insoluble problems, it will meet with some resistance in whatsoever direction it may move. We must be content with probabihty and provisional know- ledge, since certainty and satisfying and accurate 162 The Personality of God knowledge are for us at present impossible. Twilight is better than utter darkness. To " see men as trees walking " is better than to be totally blind, and it is a prophecy of the gradual coming of clearer and more adequate vision. We must not tlirow away our flickering lamp, merely because its light is unable to penetrate into dense forests around us. The great merit of rational Theism is that it does not ignore or turn away from any ascertained and important facts, whilst Atheism, Pantheism, and utter Agnosticism all more or less ignore some pro- foundly significant facts of our higher life. They are all obhged to give the he, to some extent, to our conscience and to our spiritual nature aa a whole. Broad, patient, and reflective Theism is, in our age, a veritable cave Adullam, into which are gathered " everyone that is in distress, and every- one that is discontented," every fragment of truth at present unduly ignored by precipitate men of science, in their wish to emphasize other truths, or to build an entirely symmetrical temple of know- 163 The Personality of God ledge. Here are gathered together the outcast forms of " unclothed " truths, wandering be- tween two worlds, the world of estabUshed facts, and the ideal world of poetry and im- agination, where dwell the seminal principles of a profounder faith and a loftier knowledge. Religion of the wiser sort alone gathers up the lessons of the past, and gazes onwards to the dimly-gleaming phantom forms of undiscovered or unclassified verities as yet inconceivable to us. Perhaps the best religion, like God, is patient, because it feels itself to be eternal. Atheism and dogmatism are both the result of unwise precipitation of judgment. The French philosopher, Victor Cousin, has expressed very clearly the teaching of what we may call a Christian, patient, and onward-looking philosophy, at once full of faith and tinged with reasonable Agnosticism. He wrote thus: " Else- where we have estabUshed in some manner at once the comprehensibiHty and the incomprehensibiUty of God. . . . God, as the cause of the universe, reveals Himself to us; but God is not only the cause of the universe; He is also the perfect and 164 The Personality of God infinite cause, possessing in Himself, not a relative perfection which is only a degree of imperfection, but an absolute perfection, an infinitude wliich ia not only the finite multipUed by itself in those ])roportion8 which the human mind is able always to enumerate, but a true infinitude, that is, the absolute negation of all Umits in all the powers of His being. Moreover, it is not true that an inde- finite effect adequately expresses an infinite cause. Hence it is not true that we are able absolutely to comprehend God by the world and by man; for all of God is not in them. . . . There remains, then, in God, beyond the universe and man, some- thing unknown, impenetrable, incomprehensible. Hence, in the immeasurable spaces of the universe, and beneath all the profundities of the human soul, God escapes us in His inexhaustible infinitude, whence He is able to draw without Hmit new worlds, new beings, new manifestations. It is, therefore, an equal error to call Grod absolutely comprehensible and absolutely incomprehensible. He is both invisible and present, revealed and with- drawn in Himself, in the world and out of the world, so familiar and intimate with His creatures that 165 The Personality of God we see Him by opening our eyes, that we feel Him in feeling our hearts beat, and at the same time inaccessible in His impenetrable majesty; mingled with everything, and separated from everything, manifesting Himself in universal life, and causing scarcely an ephemeral shadow of His eternal essence to appear there; communicating Himself without cessation, and remaining incommunicable ; at once the Uving God and the God concealed, ' Deus vivus et Deus absconditus.' " This teaching of the briUiant French thinker is in full harmony with that of the veteran philo- sopher, James Martineau, who declared that " All our behefs and speech concerning God are untrue, and yet infinitely truer than any non-belief and silence." A child's conception of the inner nature of his father's mind is necessarily erroneous in many ways, but it has a real provisional value, and is far better than no conception of any sort. Diluted truth is not the same thing as complete ignorance. The divine ideas suffice to guide us practically, though they cannot become incarnate in our present humanity without losing much of their coherent absoluteness. We can experi- 1 66 The Personality of God ence a little of the Infinite, whilst utterly powerless to define it adequately. We cannot know God in His essence; but we have good reason for be- lieving that He " is greater than our hearts, and knoweth all things." 167 / TOLSTOrS MELANCHOLY AND HOPEFULNESS Ill In some ways it may seem strange that there was in Tolstoy such profound melancholy combined with such robust hopefulness. But the truth is that he was pessimistic as to the actual state of the world and almost optimistic as to its coming de- liverance. So long as men hved as they do at present, he thought that great and wide -spread misery was inevitable, but when they came to act according to the precepts of Jesus, human life would be comparatively happy. The greater part of human wretchedness Tolstoy thought to be avoidable. His view on this matter was like that of St Paul when he spoke of " this present evil world." Yet, though human life might be made com- paratively happy, Tolstoy considered that it could never in this world be entirely satisfactory. It must always be a more or less sorrowful pil- 171 Tolstoy's Melancholy grimage. Man's true citizenship is in the heavens. In order that each man might be really and adequ- ately happy, Tolstoy thought that it was necessary that others should love him better than they loved themselves, and this is impossible. The sympathetic and benevolent Hfe, as con- ceived by Tolstoy, inevitably has great griefs, but it has also great consolations. Moral IdeaHsm at once depresses us, and by its fine suggestiveness inspires ultimate hopefulness. The very fact that the soul is profoundly discontented seems to indicate that it is born for a loftier world. Thus, as the Bible teaches, " we are saved by hope." But, at the very bottom of Tolstoy's spirit, there was ever brooding the deep sadness of the baffled and aspiring mystic. Human life must on earth for ever remain tantalizing and fundamentally unsatis- fying. It could never satisfy men's hunger and thirst for the infinite and the perfect. The trail of the finite is over it aU. Deep spirits are often more vexed and cast down by the finiteness and grievous hmitatioiis of man's present existence than by its sins or its sorrows. To them, as to 172 and Hopefulness Emerson, it often seems that the only sin is limita- tion. The pettiness of man seems to mar all his goodness. The necessitated selfishness, the in- stabihty, and the fickleness of the human race drive the deeper souls to despair. They seem to deprive life of all really serious meaning. Con- sidered as an end in itself, earthly existence can never be worth having. Like all real mystics, Tolstoy thought that, without God, science and philosophy can never truly minister adequately to our wants. He would have sympathized with St Augustine when he declared concerning the books of the philo- sophers: "These, O Lord, were the dishes in which they brought to me being hungry the sun and the moon instead of Thee." All the best mystics wish, in a certain sense, to " cease from man," but not in the Calvinistic sense. They regard human nature as unsatisfying rather than as innately vile. They wish to cease from the actual man, in order that they may in some measure find the ideal man. In their view, ordinary human nature is a kind of dame's school for infantine spirits. And, in its higher phases, 173 Tolstoy's Melancholy that nature suggests rather than truly or adequ- ately reveals God. The nobler faculties of man are only in the making here on earth. They all of them are ready to cry with St John: " It doth not yet appear what we shall be." Ardent moral ideaUsts such as Tolstoy are saved from despair only by remembering, as St Paul did, that " the creation was made subject to vanity not willingly." In a spiritual sense Tolstoy had really profound affinity with the philosopher, Malebranche. He held that we must see all things in God if we are to understand them thoroughly. Like Browning, the Russian mystic held that aU man's highest faculties have a tendency to God, that in some dim, instinctive way, they are partially aware that God is their only real refuge. In order to know ourselves adequately, we must in some measure know God. The divine nature partly understood is needed as a kind of " Interpreter's House " by human nature in its prolonged spiritual pilgrimage. All man's grandest powers instinctively exclaim, " Our hfe is hid with Christ in God." Tolstoy thought that, in one sense, we must " cease from man," in order that we may learn to 174 and Hopefulness understand him thoroughly. He considered that " the proper study of mankind is man " only so far as preparatory or introductory knowledge is concerned. Man is not self-interpreting. Whilst his feet are on the earth, his head is in the clouds. The best tendencies of human nature can only be genuinely comprehended when they are seen to culminate in the divine nature. In a very real sense, we do see all things in God, at least all the things that are most worth seeing. Man can never be liis own veritable self till he is " made partaker of the divine nature." And so it comes to pass that real and devout mysticism is both sorrowful and always rejoicing. Unlike Calvinism, it beheves firmly in the im- mense suggestiveness of man's nature. But it also beheves that, whilst absent from God, it is necessarily " sore let and hindered " in its pilgrim- age towards spiritual nobleness. Like other in- choate and undeveloped things, our highest nature must necessarily often appear almost meaningless. Its true significance is to be looked for in its latest stages, when it shall be at home in God, when " this corruptible shall have put on incorruption." 175 Melancholy and Hopefulness And so, in this world, abiding sorrow and dis- satisfaction must always be mingled with the hope- fulness of the real mystic. Whilst we are present in the body, we must always be, to a great extent, " absent from the Lord." It is only in our rare hours of free communion with the divine mind that we can understand and appreciate ourselves. Great souls Hke that of Tolstoy must always thirst for God during their earthly Hfe. They can never be contented here on earth. Their lofty discontent does not arise from real con- tempt for the best qualities of human nature. Rather, it arises from a keen appreciation of their potential glory. The full meaning of heroism, fidehty, seK-sacrifice, and love will only then be revealed to us, when at last we are permitted to gaze upon them in their very highest development in the free moral splendour of God. Then only shall we know ourselves, when we are permitted to know Grod. 176 TOLSTOY'S VIEWS ON ART IV Tolstoy's ideas about art, though containing much that is noble and true, will always seem to the majority of educated and reflecting people rather one-sided and exaggerated, even after read- ing the excellent explanation of them given us by Mr Aylmer Maude, an ardent disciple of the great Russian teacher. Tolstoy declared that " Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has hved through, and that other people are infected by these feeHngs, and also ex- perience them." And he considered that the more infectious or contagious art was, the better it also was. Art, viewed merely as art, has, confessedly, nothing to do with morality; but Tolstoy con- sidered that good art must be universal in its ap- 179 Tolstoy's Views on Art peal, and not in any way exclusive. He thought that the art which was unintelHgible to a great number of people could not possibly be of a really high and good kind. His idea that art is far more closely connected with emotion than with thought is manifestly true. The main objection to Tolstoy's teaching about Art is that he wishes to make it too exclusively moral and social. The Russian reformer was at once a moraUty-intoxicated man, a rehgion-in- toxicated man, and a democracy-intoxicated man. He had too Httle appreciation of purely intellectual beauty. His comparatively late conversion made him a httle too austere. In his later years the moral element exercised a too despotic and ex- clusive sway. It was not tempered, as it was in James Martineau, by a real love of philosophy for its own sake. The Russian prophet was never really a philosopher. Mr Aylmer Maude shows us this when he tells us that Tolstoy was highly satisfied with Matthew Arnold's shallow and un- philosophical rehgious books. Tolstoy's flat denial that beauty can be a criterion of art, because men have such different notions of 1 80 Tolstoy's Views on Art it, needs considerable qualification. Taking the world collectively, we might almost say that men's notions of moral nobleness or goodness are as vari- ous and discrepant as their ideas of beauty are. Both Tolstoy and Martineau attributed to the dehverances of conscience a steadfast clearness, decisiveness, and oracular authority which, in many cases, are not really found in them. Since we have no definite and universally recog- nized idea of beauty, it is true that we cannot apply it as a criterion to art as an exact and adequate test, but we may yet legitimately use it as an approximate, provisional, partial, and to some extent useful test, in much the same way that we apply our conceptions of right and wrong to ethical problems. The demand of the Russian moralist that the finest art must be universal in its appeal, and in no way exclusive, seems decidedly erroneous in some ways, as also does his idea that it must always be distinctly moral. The best Greek sculpture and architecture were neither moral nor immoral. They were chiefly a kind of glorifica- tion of symmetry. Music does not preach to us directly concerning our ethical and social life, and i8i Tolstoy's Views on Art so, in his very undue depreciation of it, the austere Russian called it " the most refined lust of the senses." To most men it will seem that Cardinal Newman gave us a far truer description of the functions of music in his famous eulogy of it. The finest music is far removed from anything hke lust. It is as the voice of the corruptible aheady putting on incorruption, and of the mortal already putting on immortahty. It is our nearest approach to the one language of the immortals. The idea that art cannot be of the highest kind, unless it appeals at once to the whole human race, is gravely misleading. The uneducated can only learn very gradually to understand and appreciate a good deal of the finest art. Reaction from the aesthetic pride of Nietzsche should not make us set up the commonplace as an idol. Very often the best service that true art can do for the people is to convince them of their ignorance, vulgarity, and bad taste, as old Socrates convicted his Athenian hearers of intellectual ignorance. Art must not be " rightous over-much," lest it in great measure destroy itself. Divines make 182 Tolstoy's Views on Art a great mistake when they represent God as an exclusively ethical being. All beauty and all in- tellectual splendour are reflections of the nature of God. Many souls are best led to moral good- ness indirectly, some by beauty, some by intellect, some by heroism, and some by love of the sub- lime. Rigidly and exclusively ethical instruction often repels many souls and nauseates them by monotony. In the present state of the education of the world, art cannot be quite so democratic as Tolstoy wished it to be. For a time it must treat the un- educated as children, and not as men. It legiti- mately seeks to refine mankind as well as to purify it morally. It does not beheve that the vox populi, in its present uneducated condition, is entirely coincident with the vox Dei. The best art is more genuinely Cathohc in its tastes than Tolstoy was. It strives to give men the power of appreciating many things which as yet they do not understand or value. Would the Russian morahst say that Plato's glorious Dialogues are not true or fine art, merely because their appeal is at present to the few rather than to the many? Are the more intel- 183 Tolstoy's Views on Art lectual portions of Shelley's poems inartistic, because they are unintelligible to the uneducated? Was the art of Tennyson, Browning, and George Meredith of an inferior kind, merely because it makes scarcely any real appeal to the followers of the Salvation Army? Some of the very finest things in man are at present the rarest. Jesus Christ declared that He had many things to say to His disciples which they could not bear or under- stand then. Suppose that some extraordinarily congenial mind had understood and appreciated those deeper thoughts of Christ and had expressed them in a noble poem, ought men to have declared that the poem was not true or fine art, merely because it soared above the thoughts of the com- monplace? The deepest souls almost always are in some sense incomprehensible to inferior souls. Precocious souls are often despised and rejected of men. Commonplace people often persecute and slay the Prophets, instead of appreciating them. Idealists are in many ways strangers upon earth; one part of their brains is already in the stars. Suppose that some great painter had fived in the days of St Augustine, and suppose that he had 184 Tolstoy's Views on Art managed, by extraordinary sympathy and skill, to portray on canvas the rare, profound, and God- haunted emotions of that baffled pilgrim of the spiritual world, would the critics of those days have been justified in declaring that that marvellous picture was not fine art, because its appeal neces- sarily was to the few rather than to the many? Art, as conceived by Tolstoy, seems to be at once too heedlesslv democratic, in some sense too sec- tarian or narrow, and too much given to preaching. Its method of having compassion on the multitude is not altogether ^vise. Whilst eagerly ministering to its present developed wants, it tends to forget its undeveloped and rarer potentialities. It thinks to minister to the commonplace too exclusively by becoming almost commonplace itself. It mis- interprets the real meaning of St Paul's wish to become all things to all men. It reminds one of those unwise rehgious teachers who, in our pubUc worship, would have us confine ourselves to those hymns which appeal at once to the very dullest and most unimaginative people in a church. Those teachers forget that it does ordinary men good to have their unexercised and well-nigh dormant 185 Tolstoy's Views on Art spiritual faculties stretched to the utmost possible extent. They ignore the truth that, in this way, it sometimes comes to pass that the great EHjah casts his mantle over the humbler EHsha. The subUme is often highly infectious. Tolstoy was one of the most candid and open- minded of men. So it is likely enough that he would have admitted the validity of some portion of the criticism here offered; for it is not entirely inconsistent with his own views as to the functions of art. He might well have admitted that he had spoken rather too precipitately and unguardedly on this subject. And we, on our part, should be quite wilhng to meet him haK-way in seeking a reconcihation of our apparently conflicting views of art. We cordially agree with him in thinking that art must not degenerate into mere prettiness. Art must have a soul. It must be a missionary, though not a sectarian one. No true artist ought to despise the people or to be content to keep them in ignorance. The best artist ought to look forward to a brighter future for the people, even as the Hebrew prophet looked forward to a coming day 1 86 Tolstoy's Views on Art when even the humblest souls should know the Lord persormlli/, and no longer have to depend on the teaching of others. Time artists ought to cherish some of that hopefulness for the people which made Shelley declare: " Yet every heart contains perfection's germ." Meanwhile the truest kindness to the ignorant and the commonplace is not to set them upon a throne as judges, but to sympathize with them in their privations, to encourage them, and to lead them on to a loftier point of view. A true friend of the people must not be a flatterer of the people. He must seek to baptize them into the kingdom of the subhme as well as into the kingdoms of right- eousness and love. There is nothing supercihous or unfriendly in the Pauhne warning, " Neglect not the gift that is in thee," even though the gift be as yet an unrecognized and undeveloped one. After all, thinking people must own that there is a good deal of much-needed wisdom in Tolstoy's teaching about art. In a sense, the Bible is right in declaring that " that is the true hght that hghteth every man that cometh into the world." 187 Tolstoy's Views on Art All really great souls have some measure of the heart of democracy in them. Their deepest ap- peal ever is to man as man, to the fundamental and unalterable instincts, feehngs, and aspirations of our race. The literature that really Hves and ex- ercises an abiding sway over our race springs from the universal heart, and is the voice of those who are in some sense universal men. The art of Shakespeare is immeasurably greater and nobler than the art of men of the school of Pater. The magnificently human and universal heart of some of the old Hebrew prophets still thrills the inmost souls of thousands. One touch of genuine human nature makes the whole world kin. Fastidious correctness is soon forgotten; but bursts of great hearts are a possession for ever. David's laments over Saul and Jonathan and Absalom are as fresh and potent as when they were first written. The deep and cHnging human love which made Samuel still mourn for Saul, even when God had rejected him, still speaks to our hearts with an abiding force of constraining sweetness and glory. The law-defying affection of Antigone for her brother is not forgotten. Across the gulf of untold ages i88 Tolstoy's Views on Art old Homer still vividly portrays for us the un- changing heart of human love in his immortal scene of the parting of Hector and Andromache. The Infinite often seems to choose the foohsh things of the world to confound the wise. Many Greek legends or stories survive, whilst many Greek philosophies are forgotten. The best kind of art must plant its feet firmly on the broad homely earth of primal human instincts and feel- ings, though its head may be in the far-off stars of God. When art degenerates into pedantic and exclusive Pharisaism, when, in its inhuman pride, it declares that the people are accursed and worth- less, when it separates itself from the great vine of collective humanity, and seeks to hve as an entirely independent branch, it soon loses its vital sap; and, even though it should gain the whole world of knowledge and of formal symmetry, it would in the end inevitably find that it had lost its own soul. THE END EDINBURGH COLSTONS LIMITED PRINTERS CENTRAL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY University of California. San Diego DATE DUE 91 wq JUN 1 4 1979 AEB-0U982 fW'ii:jO ivw2 jnNil i:!32 MAY 1 1 1982 JUL 011983 ,uN'^4l983 .T n r '^W' -S6N^ APR 2 7 1987 T": R^PAH ACQ PEP J- '-^ ijuj MAR ^ 5 ^9B8 MAR ^ 4 1988 C/39 UCSD Libr. university otCahfom^a SOUTHERN ^^^^l^t^^Xc'^^OlA-'^^ 405 HUgard Avenge, Los Ang ^^^ ^^^^^ Return this mawnc" .j from wWch«*:^i^?!!?!^ - A A 000 338 360 / 1il';^!illlplitll!;«i1i^l^ Uni