Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/299

to them who had entirely fallen; at the same time he gave them a law which, when adhered to, will save them. The contradiction consists in this, that, if men were entirely lost and God had pity on them and sent to them his Son (who is also God) to suffer and die for men and take them out of the condition in which they had been before the redemption, that condition ought to have changed; but at the same time we hear the assertion that God also gave a law to men (a law of faith and works), which if they do not follow, they perish just as much as they perished before the redemption. Thus it turns out that if obedience to the law is a condition of salvation, the salvation of men by the death of Christ is superfluous and quite useless. But, if the salvation by Christ’s death is real, obedience to the law is useless and the law itself is superfluous. It is necessary to choose one or the other, and the church teaching in reality chooses the latter, that is, it acknowledges the reality of the redemption, but, in acknowledging it, does not dare make the last necessary deduction that the law is superfluous; it does not dare do so because this law is precious and important to every man, and so it acknowledges the law only in words (and that, too, in a very indefinite manner) and carries on all the discussion in such a way as to prove the reality of the redemption and therefore the uselessness of the law. Christ’s law is in this exposition something quite superfluous, something which does not result from the essence of the whole matter, something which is not connected with the whole progress of the discussion, and so falls off by itself. That is apparent even from the manner of the expression in the heading: About the act of salvation performed by the Lord, or about the mystery of the redemption, and from the division of the chapter, in which the moral teaching occupies only a small half of the three species of salvation, and from the number of the pages which are devoted to this subject.