disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. For the life is more than the food, and the body than the raiment. Consider the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap; which have no store-chamber, nor barn; and God feedeth them: of how much more value are ye than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit unto his stature? If then ye are not able to do even that which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, ad< tli( cai wi P is y( w 0 V l I ] { THE PATH OF LIFE 253 Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed dike one of these/ However much you may concern yourself about your body and your clothes, no one can add a single hour to his life.1 Is it not senseless, then, to concern yourself about something you cannot do?
You know very well that your life will end with death, and you exert yourself to safeguard your life by property. Life cannot be safe- guarded by property. Understand that this is an absurd deception with which you delude yourself.
The meaning of life cannot consist, Christ says, in what we possess and what we acquire — what is not ourselves; it must consist in something else.
He says (Luke xii. 15-21): ‘ A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. The grounds of a certain rich man,' he says, ‘ brought forth plentifully: and he reasoned within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have not where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my corn and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, be merry. But ' God said unto him, Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul required of thee; and the 1 The word r/Xi/aa — age, time of life, is incorrectly translated ‘ stature.’ So the whole expression means: can add an hour to his life. — L. T.
WHAT I BELIEVE things which thou hast prepared, whose shall they be % So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God/ Death always, every instant, stands over you. And therefore (Luke xii. 35, 36, 38, 39, 40): 4 Let your loins be girded about, and your lamps burning; and be ye yourselves like unto men looking for their lord, when he shall return from the marriage feast; that, when he cometh and knocketh, they may straightway open unto him. And if he shall come in the second watch, and if in the third, and find them so, blessed are those servants. But this ye know, that if the master of the house had known in what hour the thief was coming, he would have watched, and not have left his house to be broken through. Be ye also ready: for in an hour that ye think not the Son of' man cometh/ The parable of the virgins awaiting the bridegroom, and of the end of the age and the day of judgement — all these passages, in the opinion of all the commentators, besides relating to the end of the world, also relate to death, which stands always before us every hour.
Death, death, death awaits you every second. Your life passes in the presence of death. If you labour personally for your own future, you yourself know that the one thing awaiting you is— death. And that death ruins all you work for. Consequently life for oneself can have no meaning. If there is a reasonable life it must be found elsewhere; it must be a life tie flirt mu; I out j of wi' thi su tl te ini t - ii P j it THE PATH OF LIFE the aim of which does not lie in preparing further life for oneself. To live rationally, one nust live so that death cannot destroy life.
■r Luke x. 41: ‘ Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things: but 3ne thing is needful/ All the innumerable things we do for our pwn future are unnecessary: it is all deception with which we delude ourselves. Only one thing is needful.
From the day of man’s birth, his position is such that inevitable destruction awaits him — that is to say, a meaningless life and a meaning- less death, unless he finds that one thing necessary for true life. It is that one thing s which Christ shows to men. He does not invent it, or promise to give it by his divine power; he only shows people that, together with that personal life which is certainly a deception, there must be something that is true and not a deception.
In the parable of the husbandmen (Matt, xxi. 33-42) Christ explains the source of the error which hides that truth from men, and causes them to mistake the phantom of life (their own personal life) for true life.
Men, living in the cultivated garden of a householder, took it into their heads that they owned that garden. And from this false conception flowed a series of insensate and cruel actions performed by them, which ended in their expulsion, in their being ejected from ■ that life. In just such a way have we imagined that the life of each of us is his own personal WHAT I BELIEVE possession, and that we have a right to it and can do with it as we please, bound by no t obligation to any one. And for us, having imagined this, a similar series of insensate j, and cruel actions and misfortunes is inevitable, ^ resulting in a similar expulsion from life, jy And as the husbandmen thought that the more ^ cruel they were, the better would they secure B( themselves (for instance, by killing the mes- f sengers and the householder's son), so we also 0 imagine that the more cruel we are, the better j we shall be safeguarded. Y As the inevitable end of the husbandmen ^ who would not yield the fruit of the garden to D any one was that the householder expelled j them, so also will be the end of those who t imagine personal life to be real life. Death • drives them from life, replacing them by others; g and this not as a punishment, but merely because they have not understood life. As j the dwellers in the garden had either forgotten or wished to ignore the fact that the garden was handed to them ready cultivated, hedged, and supplied with a well, and that some one had laboured there before, and therefore expected them to work; so people living a personal j life have forgotten, or wish to forget, all that was done for them before their birth and is being done all the time they are alive, and j that something is therefore expected of them:; they wish to forget that all the good things of life which they use have been given and are being given, and should therefore be passed on | and returned. \ THE PATH OF LIFE THE PATH OF LIFE This correction of the understanding of life, this fA€T dvoia is the corner-stone of Christ's teaching, as he said at the end of that parable. According to Christ's teaching, as the husband- men in the garden they had not planted should have understood and realized that they owed more to the householder than they could repay, so we also should understand and feel that, from the day of our birth to our death, we are overwhelmingly in debt to others, to those who lived before us, those now living, and those who will live, and to that which was, is, and will be — the source of all things. They should understand that each hour of their life, while they retain it, they admit that obligation, and that therefore a man living for himself who denies that obligation uniting him with life and with the source of life, deprives himself of life, and must understand that, by living so, he, while wishing to save his life, destroys it — as was repeatedly said by Christ.
That only is true life which carries on the life of the past, promotes the welfare of the present, and prepares the welfare of the future.
To participate in that life a man must forgo his own will and do the will of the Father of life, who has given life to the Son of man.
In John viii. 35, Christ, again expressing the same thought, says that a slave who follows his own will and not the will of the master abideth not in the house for ever: only the Son, who fulfilleth the will of the Father, abideth for ever, K WHAT I BELIEVE The will of the Father of life is not the life fc of an individual man, but of the only Son of cl man, dwelling within men, and therefore a man fc preserves his life only when he takes his life ir as a loan, a talent entrusted to him by the Father j! a for the service of the life of all, and lives not ' h for himself but for the Son of man. t Matt. xxv. 14-46: A master gave part of j li his property to each of his bondsmen, and, without giving them any instructions, left it them alone. Some of the bondsmen, though! s they had received no orders from their master j as to the use of his property, understood that 1 it was not theirs but the master's, and that it i should increase; and they worked for their i master. And those who worked for their < master became partakers in the master's life, ] but those who did not work were deprived of what had been given them.
The life of the Son of man is given to all men, and they are not told why it is entrusted to them. Some understand that life is not their own, but was received as a gift, and that they should serve the life of the Son of man; and they live accordingly. Others, on the pretext of not understanding the aim of life, do not serve life. And those who serve life merge with the source of life; while those who do not serve life are deprived of it. And (in verses 31 to 46) Christ tells us wherein the service of the Son of man consists, and what the reward of that service is. The Son of man, as Christ expressed it, will say like a king: ‘ Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the THE PATH OE LIFE 259 6 kingdom, for ye gave me meat and drink, * clothed me, took me in and comforted me, b for I am ever one and the same, in you and e in these little ones, whom you have pitied r and to whom you have done good. You ■ have not lived the personal life, but the life of the Son of man; therefore you have eternal 1 life/ Only of eternal life of that kind does Christ ^ teach in all the Gospels, and, strange as it may i sound to say it of Christ, who personally rose and promised resurrection to all, never did Christ by a single word assert a personal resurrection and personal immortality beyond the grave; and to the restoration of the dead in the king- dom of the Messiah, which the Pharisees taught, he gave a meaning which excluded the con- ception of personal resurrection.
The Sadducees denied the restoration of the dead. The Pharisees acknowledged it, and it is now acknowledged by orthodox Jews.
The restoration of the dead (and not the resur- rection, as the word is incorrectly translated), according to the belief of the Jews, will be accomplished at the coming of the time of the Messiah and the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. And Christ, encountering this belief in a temporary, local, and corporeal j resurrection, denies it, and puts in place of it his teaching of eternal life in God.
When the Sadducees, who did not acknowledge the restoration of the dead, asked Christ, whom they supposed to share the view of the Pharisees, ‘ To whom will the wife of the seven brothers WHAT I BELIEVE belong? ’ he replied clearly and definitely on both points.
He says (Matt. xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24- 27; Luke xx. 34-38): 4 Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God.’ And, rejecting the Pharisees’ view, he says: The restoration of the dead is neither corporeal nor personal. Those who attain to a restoration from the dead become sons of God and live like the angels (the powers of God) in heaven (i.e. with God); and personal questions — such as whose wife a woman will be — cannot exist for them, for they, united with God, cease to be personalities. ■ ‘ As touching the restoration of the dead,’ says he, replying to the Sadducees, who only acknowledged earthly life, ‘ have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God % ’ In the book of Moses it is said that God from the bush spake unto Moses, saying, 4 1 am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ If God said to Moses that he is the God of Jacob, then Jacob is not dead for God, since God is the God of the living only, and not of the dead. For God, all are alive. And therefore, if there is a living God, that man also lives who has entered into communion with the ever-living: God.
Against the Pharisees Christ says that the restoration of life cannot be corporeal and per- sonal. Against the Sadducees he says that, besides a personal and temporary life, there is also a life in communion with God.
Christ denies the personal, the corporeal THE PATH OF LIFE a resurrection,1 but acknowledges a restoration of life in a man who merges his life into God’s. , Christ teaches salvation from personal life and a places that salvation in the exaltation of the 1, Son of man and life in God. Uniting this teach- e ing of his with the Jewish doctrine of the i coming of a Messiah, he speaks to the Jews of i the raising of the Son of man from the dead, ? meaning by this, not a corporeal and personal restoration of the dead, but an awakening of i life in God. He never spoke of a corporeal, - personal resurrection. The best proof that he never preached the resurrection of man is fur- nished by the two solitary passages quoted by the theologians in proof of his having taught the doctrine of resurrection. These two pas- sages are Matt. xxv. 31-46 and John v. 28, 29. The first of these speaks of the coming, i.e. of the restoration, the exaltation, of the Son of 1 Tolstoy her© adopts the views he attributes to Ohrist. Some years later his opinion on the subject svas somewhat modified. He came to lay less stress on the words attributed to Christ; and his own experience was that the more he came to identify his aopes and efforts with doing the will of his Father n heaven, that is to say, with helping right to prevail, die crooked to become straight, and the rough places •smooth, here on earth — the less credible did it seem diat his existence could cease with the death of the dody. But he maintained that we neither know, nor can mow, what kind of existence awaits us in the future; whether our personalities will persist, whether we shall merge into the infinite like drops into the ocean, whether we shall be reincarnated, or whether groups df those who have co-operated most closely together nay not merge with one another into one larger ndividuality.
WHAT I BELIEVE man (just as in Matt. x. 23) and therefore the t majesty and power of the Son of man are com- a pared to a king. In the second passage what s is spoken of is the restoration of true life here 8 on earth, as it is expressed in the preceding | < twenty -four verses.
One need only reflect on the meaning of | Christ’s teaching of eternal life in God, and recollect the teaching of the Hebrew prophets, to understand that if Christ wished to teach the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which was then only beginning to find a place in the Talmud and was a subject of dispute, he would have stated that doctrine clearly and definitely; but, on the contrary, not only did he not do so, but he rejected it; and not a single place can be found in any one of the Gos- pels which confirms that doctrine. The two passages referred to above mean something quite different.
Of his own personal resurrection — strange as this may sound to people who have not them- selves studied the Gospels — Christ never spoke at all! If, as the theologians teach, the basis of Christian faith lies in the resurrection of Christ, one would think that the least one could wish would be that Christ, knowing that he would rise again and that this would constitute the chief dogma of the Christian faith, should at least once say so clearly and definitely. But not only did he not say so definitely and clearly, he never once, not one single time in all the canonical Gospels, even mentioned it! What Christ taught was to exalt the Son of man; THE PATH OF LIFE THE PATH OF LIFE that is to say, the essential life of man, and to acknowledge oneself a son of God. Christ per- sonified in himself a man acknowledging son- ship to God (Matt. xvi. 13-20). He asked the disciples what men said of him — the Son of man? The disciples replied that some con- sidered him to be John the Baptist miracu- lously risen from the dead, or a prophet; others, Elijah descended from heaven. ‘ But who do you say I am? ’ asked he. And Peter, under- standing Christ as he understood himself, re- plied: 4 Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ And Christ replied: ‘ Not flesh and blood hath revealed this unto thee, but our Father which is in heaven.’ That is to say, you have understood this not because you believed human explanations, but because you, recognizing yourself to be a son of God, have understood me. And, explaining to Peter that on this sonship to God the true faith rests, Christ warned the other disciples (v. 20) that they should not in future say that he, Jesus, was the Messiah.
And after this Christ says that, notwith- standing the fact that he would be tortured and killed, the Son of man, knowing himself to be God’s Son, would nevertheless be re-estab- lished and triumph over all. And it is these words that are interpreted as a prediction of his resurrection!
John ii. 19-22; Matt, xii, 40; Luke xi. 30; Matt. xvi. 4-21; Mark viii. 31; Luke ix. 22; Matt. xvii. 23; Mark ix. 31; Matt. xx. 19; Mark x. 34; Luke xviii. 33; Matt. xxvi. 32; WHAT I BELIEVE Mark xiv. 28. Those are all the fourteen pas- sages which are understood as being predictions by Christ of his resurrection. In three of them what is spoken of is Jonah in the whale’s belly, and in one the reconstruction of the Temple. In the remaining ten passages it is said that the Son of man cannot be destroyed, but nowhere is there one word about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In none of these passages, in the original, does the word 4 resurrection 5 even occur. Give a man who does not know the theological inter- pretation, but who knows Greek, these passages to translate, and he will never translate them as they have been translated. In the original two different words are used in three passages; the one is <m orrrjjju and the other lyelpw. One of these words means, 4 to upraise ’; the other means 4 to awaken,’ and, in the middle voice, 4 to wake up,’ 4 to rouse oneself.’ But neither the one nor the other ever, under any circum- stances, can mean 4 to raise from the dead.’ In order fully to convince oneself that these Greek words, and the corresponding Hebrew word Kum, cannot mean 4 to raise from the dead,’ one need only compare the other passages in the Gospels where these words are used. They are used frequently and never translated by the words 4 to raise from the dead ’ ( auferstehen, ressusciter); such words did not exist in Greek or in Hebrew, nor was there the conception that corresponds to them. To express in Greek, or in Hebrew, the conception of resurrection one has to employ a circumlocution and say!
THE PATH OF LIFE THE PATH OF LIFE 4 arose from the dead 9 or 4 awoke from the dead.’ So in the Gospels (Matt. xiv. 2) where the matter in hand is that Herod assumed the resurrection of John the Baptist, the words used are 4 is risen from the dead/ So also in Luke xvi. 31, it is said, in the parable about Lazarus, that if there were a resurrection, the man who returned from the dead would still not be believed, and the ex- pression used is: 4 if one rise from the dead/ Where to the words 4 to rise/ £ to awaken/ the words 4 from the dead ’ are not added, the words 4 rise ’ and 4 awaken ’ never imply or could imply, 4 resurrection/ And, speaking of himself, Christ did not once, in all the passages quoted as proof of his prediction of his resur- rection— not one single time did he employ the words, 4 from the dead/ Our conception of the resurrection is so different from the Jewish conception of life that it is impossible even to imagine how Christ could have spoken to the Jews about resur- rection and an everlasting, personal life belong- ing to each man. The conception of a future personal life has come to us neither from Jewish teaching nor from Christ’s teaching. It entered church doctrine quite from without. Strange as it may appear, it cannot but be said that a belief in a future personal life is a very low and gross conception (based on a confusion of sleep with death) and one natural to all savage tribes; and that the Hebrew doctrine, not to speak of the Christian doctrine, stood immeasurabfy above it. We are convinced that this super- K* WHAT I BELIEVE K* WHAT I BELIEVE stition is something very elevated, and seriously | u try to prove the superiority of our teaching to | h other doctrines by the fact that we hold this | $ superstition, while others, such as the Chinese | 0 and Hindus, do not hold it. This is argued not 0 only by theologians but also by the freethinking, j ( scholarly historians of religion (Tiele, Max j { Miiller and others), who, when classifying re- I j ligion, reckon those which share this super- | c stition as superior to those which do not share j it. The freethinking Schopenhauer plainly calls the Hebrew religion the vilest (nieder- j trachtigste) of all religions, because it contains j no idea (Jceine Idee) of the immortality of the j soul. Actually, in the Hebrew religion, \ neither that conception nor that word exists, j Eternal life, in Hebrew, is chayi-olam. Oiam, means endless, immovable in time. Olam also I means the world, the cosmos, life in general, and especially endless life. Cliayi-olam, according to the Hebrew doctrine, is an attribute of the one God. God is the God of life, the living God. Man in the Hebrew conception is always mor- tal; only God is ever-living. In the Pentateuch the words ‘ live for ever 5 are twice employed, j Once in Deuteronomy, xxxii. 39, 40, God says: | ‘ See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no; God but me: I kill, and I make alive; I have wounded and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand. For I lift up my hand to heaven, and say, As I live for ever.../ The other time, in Genesis iii. 22, God says: ‘ Be- hold, the man has eaten of the fruit of the tree I of knowledge of good and evil, and is become as | THE PATH OF LIFE us [one of us]; and now, may he not put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever? 3 Except in one chapter of the apocryphal book of Daniel, these are the only two instances of the use of the words ‘ live for ever 3 in the Pentateuch or in the whole of the Old Testament, and they clearly define the Jews3 conception of life generally and of life eternal. Life itself, in the conception of the Jews, is eternal, and so is life in God; but man is mortal, such is his nature.
Nowhere in the Old Testament is it said, as taught in our Bible-classes, that God breathed into man an immortal soul, or that the first man before he sinned was immortal. God created man, as is told in the first story in the book of Genesis (ch. i. 26) just as He created the animals, of the male and female gender: and He ordered them to be fruitful and multiply in just the same way. Just as it is not said of the animals that they are immortal, so it is not said of man. In the following chapters it is plainly said that God drove man out of paradise and warded him off from the way to the tree of life. So that man did not eat of the fruit of the tree of life, and did not obtain chayi-olam — that is to say, ‘ life for ever 3 — but remained mortal.
According to the Jewish teaching man is man just as we know him — that is to say, he is mortal. Life in him is only life continuing itself in the race from generation to generation. Only the I race, according to the teaching of the Jews, has in itself the possibility of life. When God says: WHAT I BELIEVE WHAT I BELIEVE ‘ You shall live and not die/ He speaks to the j a race. The life breathed by God into man is 1 a mortal for each separate man; but this life is continued from generation to generation if men b fulfil their covenant with God — that is to say, ^ fulfil the conditions demanded for this by j li God. | t Having set forth all the laws, and said that | t these laws are not from heaven, but are in their hearts, Moses says in Deuteronomy xxx. 15: 1 ‘ See, I have set before thee life and good, and t death and evil; in that I command thee to love i God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his 1 commandments, that thou mayest live/ And ] in verse 19: ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee! life and death, the blessing and the curse: there- i fore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou, and thy seed: to love God, to obey his voice, and to cleave unto him; for from him is thy life 1 and the length of thy days/ The chief distinction between our understand- j ing of human life and that of the Jews consists in this, that according to our understanding j our mortal life, transmitted from generation to generation, is not real life but a fallen life, for some reason temporarily spoilt; but in the j Jewish conception this life is the most real, it is the highest good, given to man on condition that he fulfils the will of God. From our point of view, the transmission of that fallen life from generation to generation is the continuation of a curse. From the point of view of the Jews, it is the highest blessing attainable by man, II THE PATH OF LIFE 269 and to be reached only by fulfilling God's ' will.
It is on that understanding of life that Christ bases his teaching of the true or eternal life, which he contrasts with personal and mortal life. 4 Ye search the scriptures.' says Christ to ithe Jews (John v. 39), 4 because ye think that in them ye have eternal life.'
A young man asked Christ (Matt. xix. 16) how to enter into eternal life. Christ, replying to the question of eternal life, says: 4 If thou wouldest enter into life (he does not say eternal life, but simply life), keep the commandments.' I He says the same to the lawyer (Luke x. 28): 4 This do, and thou shalt live,' and here also he said live simply, without adding Hive eternally.' Christ in both cases defines what would be understood by the words 4 eternal life '; when he uses them he says to the Jews what had often been said in their law, namely, that the fulfilment of God's will is eternal life.
Christ, in contradiction to temporal, private* personal life, teaches that eternal life which, in Deuteronomy, God promised to Israel; only [with this difference, that, according to the Jew- ish conception, eternal life endured only in the chosen people of Israel; and to obtain that life it was necessary to observe the exceptional laws God had given to Israel; while, by Christ's teaching, eternal life continues in the Son of man, and what is needed to preserve it is the observance of the laws of Christ, which express God's will for the whole of humanity.
WHAT I BELIEVE Christ contrasts with personal life, not a life is beyond the grave but common life bound up ligh with the past, present, and future, the life of tie the whole of humanity, the life of the Son of! cob man.. tie The salvation of personal life from death, of according to the teaching of the Jews, lay in jfcii the fulfilment of the will of God expressed in of the law of Moses by His commandments. Only | ti( on that condition did life, as the Jews under- gi stood it, not perish but pass on from generation to generation among God's chosen people. The tl salvation of personal life from death, according p to Christ's teaching, lies in a similar fulfilment a of the will of God expressed in Christ's command- 1 ments. Only on that condition, according to I Christ's teaching, does personal life not perish i but become ever secure in the Son of man. The difference is only in this, that Moses' service of God is a service of the God of one people, while Christ's service of God is a service of the God of all mankind. The survival of life in the genera- tions of one race was doubtful, for that people itself might disappear, and also because that survival depended on corporeal descendants. The survival of life by Christ's teaching is indubitable, because life, according to his teaching, is transferred to the Son of man, who lives by the will of the Father.
But, even supposing the words of Christ about! a day of judgement, the end of the age, and other sayings in John's Gospel have a meaning referring to a life beyond the grave for the souls of those who have died, nevertheless it THE PATH OF LIFE is unquestionable that his teaching about the light of life and the kingdom of God also has the meaning, comprehensible to his hearers and ; comprehensible to us, that the only true life is the life of the Son of man according to the will of the Father. It is easier to admit this, since ; the doctrine of true life according to the will of the Father of life can include the concep- tion of immortality and of life beyond the grave.
It may be more correct to suppose that, after this worldly life lived for the fulfilment of his personal will, an everlasting personal life still awaits a man in paradise with all possible de- lights: perhaps that is more correct; but to think that it is so, and to try to believe that for I good deeds I shall be rewarded with everlasting bliss, and for bad deeds with everlasting tor- ments, does not conduce to an understanding fe of Christ’s teaching. On the contrary, to think so deprives Christ’s teaching of its chief basis.
The whole teaching of Christ is that his I disciples, having understood the illusory nature of personal life, should renounce it and transfer it into the life of the whole of humanity; the life of the Son of man. The teaching of the immortality of the personal soul, on the other hand, does not call for the renunciation of one’s personal life, but rivets that personality for ever.
According to the conception of the Jews, the Chinese, the Hindus, and all the people of the world who do not believe the dogma of the fall of WHAT I BELIEVE man and his redemption, life is life as we know it. A man copulates, has children, brings them up, grows old, and dies. His children grow up and continue his life, which goes on uninter- ruptedly from generation to generation, just as all goes on in the world: stones, earth, metals, plants, animals, stars, and everything in the universe. Life is life, and must be used as well as possible. To live for oneself is irrational. Therefore, since people existed, they have sought an aim of life outside themselves; and live for their child, their family, their tribe, or for humanity, for all that does not die with their personal life.