of these people; and the more I considered it, the more I became convinced that they have a real faith, which is a necessity to them, and alone gives their life a meaning and makes it possible for them to live. . . . I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labor, and that they were content with life. While we think

it terrible that we have to suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and approach death with tranquillity, and, in most cases, gladly.

"And I learned to love those people. The more I came to know their life the more I loved them, and the easier it became for me to live. So I went on, . . . and a change took place in me which had long been preparing, and the promise of which had always been in me. The life of our circle, the rich and learned, not merely became distasteful to me, but lost all meaning for me; while the life of the whole labouring people, the whole of mankind who produce life, appeared to me in its true light. . . . And I remembered that I only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve in Him, and I die. exclaimed a voice within me. without which one cannot live. is one and the same thing. God is life. Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.' And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me.

'What more do you seek?' "This is He. He is that To know God and to live

"And I was saved from suicide. . . . And, strange to say, the strength of life which returned to me was not new, but quite old—the same that had borne me along in my earliest days. I quite returned to what belonged to my earliest childhood and youth. I returned to the belief in that Will which produced me, and desires something of me. I returned to the belief that the chief and only aim of my

life is to be better-that is, to live in accord with that Will. And I returned to the belief that I can find the expression of that Will, in what humanity, in the distant past hidden from me, has produced for its guidance: that is to say, I returned to a belief in God, in moral perfecting, and in a tradition transmitting the meaning of life. .

"I turned from the life of our circle: acknowledging that theirs is not life but only a simulacrum of life, and that the conditions of superfluity in which we live deprive us of the possibility of understanding life. . . . The simple labouring people around me were the Russian people, and I turned to them and to the meaning which they give of life. That meaning, if one can put it into words, was the following: Every man has come into this world by the will of God. And God has so made man that every man can destroy his soul or save it. The aim of man in life is to save his soul; and to save his soul he must live godly, and to live godly he must renounce all the pleasures of life, must labour, humble himself, suffer, and be merciful.

Even before Tolstoy arrived at this solemn conclusion he had begun to re-translate the four gospels. He searched the earliest manuscripts to obtain the words of Jesus in their most unadulterated form. He knew Greek, but he now felt the need of Hebrew. He sought out a rabbi in Moscow and astonished him with his great zeal and with the rapidity with which he learned to read the language. Together they read the Old Testament up to and including Isaiah, and also much of the Talmud. "In his tempestuous striving after truth," says his tutor, "he questioned me at almost every lesson about the moral views in the Talmud, and about the Talmudist explanations of the Biblical legends." (10)

These studies preceded that remarkable series of religious writings which engaged Tolstoy for the rest of his life and which included theological and philosophical treatises, con

troversial pamphlets, evangelistic leaflets, peasant stories, fables, plays, novels-all intended to teach the meaning of life as Jesus gave it to the world. He first published his "Criticism of Dogmatic Theology"; later, his "Union and Translation of the Four Gospels," "The Gospel in Brief," "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," etc. He then began to write stories and parables, intended for the peasants-all of which set forth the teaching of the gospels. "His eyes are fixed and strange," writes his wife, "he hardly talks at all, has quite ceased to belong to this world, and is positively incapable of thinking about everyday matters. He "reads, reads, reads . . . writes very little, but sometimes says: 'Now it is clearing up,' or, ‘Ah, God willing, what I am going to write will be very important!"" (11) Later, the Countess writes to her brother, Behrs: "If you could know and hear dear Leo now! He is greatly changed. He has become a Christian and a most sincere and earnest one." (12) Behrs also comments upon the remarkable change, telling us: "The transformation of his personality which has taken place in the last decade is in the truest sense entire and radical. Not only did it change his life and his attitude towards mankind and all living things, but his whole way of thinking. Leo became throughout his being the incarnate idea of love for his neighbor." (13)

While seeking his true relation to the infinite, Tolstoy was also seeking his true relation to mankind. In 1881, after living many years in the country, he came to Moscow. He began immediately to seek out the poor and made regular visits into the very lowest and most wretched sections of Moscow. The sight of town poverty depressed him terribly, and he tells us repeatedly that he invariably had a sense of having committed some dreadful crime when he beheld misery, cold, and hunger. "I realized," he says, "not only with my brain, but in every pulse of my soul,

that, whilst there were thousands of such sufferers in Moscow, I, with tens of thousands of others, filled myself daily to repletion with luxurious dainties of every description, took the tenderest care of my horses, and clothed my very floors with velvet carpets!" (14) His first impulse was to give, and he gave money with both hands, but to his utter dismay, he soon discovered that this did not seem to help the poor. "The majority of the poor whom I saw,' he writes, "were wretched, merely because they had lost the capacity, desire, and habit of earning their bread; in other words, their misery consisted in the fact that they were just like myself." (15) As he found no one whom he could help with money except one starving woman, he was forced to the conclusion that with money he could never reform that life of misery which these people led.

Tolstoy's work in the slums also taught him that all his own money came from the poor,-that they had produced all the wealth he possessed-and consequently he saw himself as one who first takes away much from the workers and peasants, and then gives them a little in return. This "philanthropy" or "charity" he describes as "taking away thousands with one hand and throwing kopeks with the other." (16) "No wonder I was ashamed," he says. "But, before beginning to do good, I must leave off the evil, and put myself in a position in which I should cease to cause it. But all my course of life is evil. If I were to give away a hundred thousand, I have not yet put myself in a condition in which I could do good, because I have still five hundred thousand left.” (17)

Never satisfied until he had thought all about and through every problem that confronted him, he was led on and on by his rigid logic until he came to feel himself a burden on the back of the poor-a burden that was crushing them down to destruction. "It is," he says, "as if I were sitting on the neck of a man, and, having quite crushed him down,

I compel him to carry me, and will not alight from off his shoulders, while I assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him, and wish to ease his condition by every means in my power except by getting off his back." (18) This conclusion seemed to Tolstoy inexorable. "I came to that simple and natural conclusion," he writes, "that if I pity the exhausted horse on whose back I ride, the first thing for me to do, if I really pity him, is to get off him and walk." (19) He realized all that this meant to him and to his class. He must cease being a parasite on labor, a nonproductive member of society, and, therefore, he says, "In order to avoid causing the sufferings and depravity of men, I ought to make other men work for me as little as possible, and to work myself as much as possible." (20) Past the middle period of life, habituated to the enjoyment of luxuries, petted by a devoted wife, possessed of large wealth, surrounded and attended by many servants, he now faced the necessity of a radical revision of his living habits.

Accosted one day by a beggar, Tolstoy gave him a few pennies, and, when the beggar had gone, he thought over his action. He felt that he should have given not only the money he had with him, but also the coat from off his shoulders, and all that he possessed at home. "Yet I had not done so," he writes, "and therefore felt, and feel, and can never cease to feel, myself a partaker in a crime which is continually being committed, so long as I have superfluous food whilst others have none, so long as I have two coats whilst there exists one man without any." (21) Through just such commonplace actions as almsgiving Tolstoy was led to the root of things-to all that it means in life to love one's neighbor as oneself-and he concluded that "there is no other love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friend. Love is love only when it is the sacrifice of one's self. Only when a man gives to