Article August 8, 1901 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from Theodore F. Seward, George Perry Morris

In an editorial in The Independent we find the following comment on Count Tolstoy's excommunication from the Orthodox Church of Russia: "We are not surprised that Tolstoy has been excommunicated. Such a Church is the Russian could not but excommunicate him and he knows it. That Church believes in the efficacy of multitudinous rites and sacraments which he believes to be nothing other than silly magic. That Church cannot well retain a man who calls its sacraments an imposture. It must be understood by the reader that it is the Russian Church which Tolstoy has in mind, not the Christianity which we are familiar with. It is his disgust with the pretensions and corruptions and persecutions of that Church that has carried him to some extremes which he would not have had occasion to emphasize if he had lived under a freer and purer Church. He takes the position of what we would call an Arian, a worshiper of God, a disciple of Jesus Christ as a teacher of morals and religion and a revealer of God, but not as himself divine. He makes Christ's literal teachings his law, with all their non-resistance and voluntary poverty, and he carries them out to the extreme of the wrong of paying texes, which Christ himself paid to Cæsar.

"We are not sorry that Tolstoy has so few disciples but we are positively glad that he puts such a ferment into the world's thinking. He sets us all to examining the bases of our beliefs and traditions. He asks us, What is truth? He makes us think what religion really is, and how much is essential to it; and what are the rights of the State, and whether war can be justified, or police control of public morality, or whether Anarchism is to be the last fruitage of Christianity."

From an editorial in the American Baptist Flag we quote this: "If conscience was an infallible guide it would guide all men to do the same thing. Many men who claim to be guided by conscience do things which are opposite and contradictory. The Hindoo mother who casts her child into the great river Ganges claims to be, and no doubt is, guided by conscience, while the cultured mother looks on in horror, her conscience revolting at the deed. This proves that conscience is but a creature of education. That which is a great sin to one is an act of devotion to the other. But Paul settled this matter beyond controversy when he said that he persecuted the church, casting into prison every one that called on the name of Jesus, but while he did all these great sins, he declared that he did it all in good conscience; he verily thought that he was doing God service. Oh, no, Paul; you did it ignorantly in unbelief, but that did not make it right; hence conscience is not a safe guide. God's law was given to define sin. Paul said: 'By the law is the knowledge of sin.' God's law, then, and not conscience, is the standard by which we are to be measured. Men who get behind conscience to screen themselves have a more flimsy covering than Adam when he endeavored to hide himself by a covering of fig-leaves."

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