How often I envied the peasants their illiteracy and lack of learning!Those statements in the creeds which to me were evident absurdities,for them contained nothing false;they could accept them and could believe in the truth--the truth I believed in.
Only to me,unhappy man,was it clear that with truth falsehood was interwoven by finest threads,and that I could not accept it in that form.
So I lived for about three years.At first,when I was only slightly associated with truth as a catechumen and was only scenting out what seemed to me clearest,these encounters struck me less.When I did not understand anything,I said,"It is my fault,I am sinful";but the more I became imbued with the truths I was learning,the more they became the basis of my life,the more oppressive and the more painful became these encounters and the sharper became the line between what I do not understand because I am not able to understand it,and what cannot be understood except by lying to oneself.
In spite of my doubts and sufferings I still clung to the Orthodox Church.But questions of life arose which had to be decided;and the decision of these questions by the Church--contrary to the very bases of the belief by which I lived--obliged me at last to renounce communion with Orthodoxy as impossible.These questions were:first the relation of the Orthodox Eastern Church to other Churches--to the Catholics and to the so-called sectarians.At that time,in consequence of my interest in religion,I came into touch with believers of various faiths:Catholics,protestants,Old-Believers,Molokans [Footnote:
A sect that rejects sacraments and ritual.],and others.And I met among them many men of lofty morals who were truly religious.
I wished to be a brother to them.And what happened?That teaching which promised to unite all in one faith and love--that very teaching,in the person of its best representatives,told me that these men were all living a lie;that what gave them their power of life was a temptation of the devil;and that we alone possess the only possible truth.And I saw that all who do not profess an identical faith with themselves are considered by the Orthodox to be heretics,just as the Catholics and others consider the Orthodox to be heretics.And i saw that the Orthodox (though they try to hide this)regard with hostility all who do not express their faith by the same external symbols and words as themselves;
And this is naturally so;first,because the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth,is the most cruel thing one man can say to another;and secondly,because a man loving his children and brothers cannot help being hostile to those who wish to pervert his children and brothers to a false belief.And that hostility is increased in proportion to one's greater knowledge of theology.
And to me who considered that truth lay in union by love,it became self-evident that theology was itself destroying what it ought to produce.
