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over a candle, and squirting milk straight into each other’s mouths.
That’s fun, and something new, and not a bit worse than drinking out
of cups.”
“Isn’t it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid of
reason for the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of
the life of man?” he thought.
“And don’t all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the
path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him
to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly
that he could not live at all without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be seen in the
development of each philosopher’s theory, that he knows what is the
chief significance of life beforehand, just as positively as the peasant
Fyodor, and not a bit more clearly than he, and is simply trying by a
dubious intellectual path to come back to what everyone knows?
“Now then, leave the children to themselves to get things alone
and make their crockery, get the milk from the cows, and so on. Would
they be naughty then? Why, they’d die of hunger! Well, then, leave us
with our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of
the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any idea of
moral evil.
“Just try and build up anything without those ideas!
“We only try to destroy them, because we’re spiritually provided
for. Exactly like the children!
“Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant,
that alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?
“Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled
with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and
living on those blessings, like the children I did not understand them,
and destroy, that is try to destroy, what I live by. And as soon as an
important moment of life comes, like the children when they are cold
and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than the children when their
mother scolds them for their childish mischief, do I feel that my child-
ish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned against me.
“Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to
me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief
thing taught by the church.
“The church! the church!” Levin repeated to himself. He turned
over on the other side, and leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the
distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river.
“But can I believe in all the church teaches?” he thought, trying
himself, and thinking of everything that could destroy his present peace
of mind. Itentionally he recalled all those doctrines of the church
which had always seemed most strange and had always been a stum-
bling block to him.
“The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence?
By nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I explain evil?... The
atonement?...
“But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what
has been told to me and all men.”
And it seemed to him that there was not a single article of faith of
the church which could destroy the chief thing—faith in God, in good-
ness, as the one goal of man’s destiny.
Under every article of faith of the church could be put the faith in
the service of truth instead of one’s desires. And each doctrine did not
simply leave that faith unshaken, each doctrine seemed essential to
complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that made
it possible for each man and millions of different sorts of men, wise
men and imbeciles, old men and children—all men, peasants, Lvov,
barré
(Barré)
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