Страница:L. N. Tolstoy. All in 90 volumes. Volume 37.pdf/272

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for such a transition of humanity from one age to another, and not in the sense that it has arrived now, vis. 1908, but that the inherent contradiction of human life; the consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and the system of life built upon the law of violence opposed to love in our time has reached that degree of intensity under which it can no longer go on, and must be met by a solution, and evidently not with a solution which favours the outlived law of violence, but in favour of the truth that the law of human life is the law of love, cherished by all humanity from the most remote antiquity.

The recognition of this truth in its full significance is possible for men, only when they free themselves completely from all religious, as well as scientific superstitions by means of which it has been for centuries hidden from mankind.

In order to save a sinking ship it is necessary to throw overboard the ballast, which though it might have been indispensable at one time, would now cause destruction. It is exactly the same with religious and scientific superstitions which hide this salutary truth from men. In order that people could embrace the truth, not in such a vague way as it presented itself to them during their childhood, nor in such a onesided, unstable way as it was interpreted to them by religious and scientific teachers, but in such a manner that it should become the highest law of human life; to effect this, the complete liberation of this truth from all, all those superstitions pseudo religious as well as pseudo scientific which now obscure it, is necessary, not a partial, timid liberation, such a one as in the religious sphere was effected by Guru-Nanaka, the founder of the religion of the Sakas, and in Christianity by Luther, or similar reformers in other religions, but a complete deliverance of the religious truth from all those ancient religious, as well as from the modern scientific superstitions.

If people only freed themselves from beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, their incarnation in Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in a paradise and hell, in angels and demons, from reincarnations, resurrections, from the idea of the interference of God in the life of the universe; free themselves chiefly from the recognition of the infallibility of the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Triptakas, Korans, etc.; if people

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