sins, my sins are your sins. Such a conception of the Christian religion
had Tolstoi in common with Dostojevsky and Gogol, with the Holy Synod, with
the popular religious conscience of millions and millions of the living and
the dead, in the orthodox world, and with all the _jurodivi_, the fools for
Christ's sake. That is the religious spirit of the best of the Slavs.



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION.


The following is the Slav point of view: Christianity came into the world,
not in order to inaugurate a new civilisation, but to infuse a new
religious spirit, to clear and purify the human conscience. A perfect
Christian spirit can exist quite outside civilisation as well as in the
midst of the most complicated civilisation. A Christian negro, in his
nudity, picking up dates under a palm tree, can be as good and saintly a
man as any business man from the Strand in London or from the Fifth Avenue
in New York. And, on the contrary, the most civilised men, like Bismarck
and Nietzsche can be of a much more anti-Christian spirit than any
primitive human creature in Central Africa or Siberia. Many civilisations
have been created without Christianity. You cannot say that Christian
London is a more perfect and beautiful city than Pagan Rome or Mohammedan
Cordova were. But you may perhaps say that the spirit of London is more
sublime and humane, more good and saintly, than the spirit of Rome and
Cordova. Well, it is the _spirit_ which regards Christianity, and nothing
else. Civilisation is only an occasion for Christianity to prove its
spirit. It is an occasion of suffering, and also of corruption. In both
cases Christianity has to be tested. Christianity has to fight against a
Pagan civilisation as well as a Pagan barbarism. It is sometimes harder for