Leo Tolstoy
Translated by
Dmitry Fadeyev
Faith defines life.
Religious consciousness is what everything else rests upon. And therefore it precedes all understanding.
In order to understand that all people are equal and that it is better for a human being to give his life to the service of others than to force others to serve him, you have to define your relationship to the world, and only religion defines the relationship of a human being to the world.
Attempts to establish morality aside from religion are akin to what is done by children who, wanting to replant their favorite plant, tear away its root, which they do not like and which appears to them superfluous, and then stick the rootless plant into the earth. It is impossible to have any real, unfeigned morality without a religious foundation, just as there cannot be a real plant without a root.
A priest asked a kind peasant who led a good life a simple, heartfelt question: does he believe in God?
“I confess, I don’t,” replied the peasant.
“What? You don’t believe in God?”
“I don’t, father. If I did, would I live the way I do? I think only about myself, I eat, I drink and I forget about God and my brothers.”
What would happen if everyone understood faith like this peasant and believed in Christ’s law?
There are two faiths: the faith of trusting what people say—this is faith in a person or people, and there is a multitude of such faiths; and the faith in your dependence on the One who sent you into this world. This is faith in God, and such faith is the same for all people.
Faith is an inevitable property of the soul.
It is inevitable that a human being believes in something. He inevitably believes in something because apart from the things about which he knows, he also has a relationship to that which he cannot know but which he knows exists. His relationship to the unfathomable is what faith is.
Every person always has an equal sense of the insignificance of all that is fathomable and the greatness of something that is unfathomable and of the utmost importance.
Whatever a person’s circumstances may be, the ideal given by Christ in his teaching is enough to receive the truest indication of what actions should and should not be taken. But it is necessary to have full trust in this teaching alone and to stop trusting all others, just as a navigator of a ship must trust his compass and stop trying to guide the ship by what he sees around him.
There are people who assert that they have no faith at all. That is not true. They just do not know their faith, or they are unable or unwilling to voice it, but they have it. The only reason they disavow their faith is because they sense that it is not good.
A man’s “religion” consists not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of, and has no need of effort for believing.
— Carlyle
Try to recognize as your faith that which you live for. This will help you correct it, if it is wrong, and become sure of it, if it is true.