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Chapter 19.
Going out of the nursery and being again alone, Levin went back
at once to the thought, in which there was something not clear.
Instead of going into the drawing room, where he heard voices, he
stopped on the terrace, and leaning his elbows on the parapet, he
gazed up at the sky.
It was quite dark now, and in the south, where he was looking,
there were no clouds. The storm had drifted on to the opposite side of
the sky, and there were flashes of lightning and distant thunder from
that quarter. Levin listened to the monotonous drip from the lime
trees in the garden, and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well,
and the Milky Way with its branches that ran through its midst. At
each flash of lightning the Milky Way, and even the bright stars, van-
ished, but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in their
places as though some hand had flung them back with careful aim.
“Well, what is it perplexes me?” Levin said to himself, feeling be-
forehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his soul,
though he did not know it yet. “Yes, the one unmistakable, incontest-
able manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which
has come into the world by revelation, and which I feel in myself, and
in the recognition of which—I don’t make myself, but whether I will or
not—I am made one with other men in one body of believers, which is
called the church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confu-
cians, the Buddhists—what of them?” he put to himself the question
he had feared to face. “Can these hundreds of millions of men be
deprived of that highest blessing without which life has no meaning?”
He pondered a moment, but immediately corrected himself. “But
what am I questioning?” he said to himself. “I am questioning the
relation to Divinity of all the different religions of all mankind. I am
questioning the universal manifestation of God to all the world with all
those misty blurs. What am I about? To me individually, to my heart
has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by
reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge in
reason and words.
“Don’t I know that the stars don’t move?” he asked himself, gazing
at the bright planet which had shifted its position up to the topmost
twig of the birch-tree. “But looking at the movements of the stars, I
can’t picture to myself the rotation of the earth, and I’m right in saying
that the stars move.
“And could the astronomers have understood and calculated any-
thing, if they had taken into account all the complicated and varied
motions of the earth? All the marvelous conclusions they have reached
about the distances, weights, movements, and deflections of the heav-
enly bodies are only founded on the apparent motions of the heavenly
bodies about a stationary earth, on that very motion I see before me
now, which has been so for millions of men during long ages, and was
and will be always alike, and can always be trusted. And just as the
conclusions of the astronomers would have been vain and uncertain if
not founded on observations of the seen heavens, in relation to a single
meridian and a single horizon, so would my conclusions be vain and
uncertain if not founded on that conception of right, which has been