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The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
page 102 of 449 (22%)
That object is to conceal the real meaning of Christ's teaching
and to replace it by their own, which lays no obligation on them,
excludes the possibility of understanding the true teaching of
Christ, and what is the chief consideration, justifies the
existence of priests supported at the people's expense.

What else has Catholicism done, what else is it doing in its
prohibition of reading the Gospel, and in its demand for
unreasoning submission to Church authorities and to an infallible
Pope? Is the religion of Catholicism any other than that of the
Russian Church? There is the same external ritual, the same
relics, miracles, and wonder-working images of Notre Dame, and the
same processions; the same loftily vague discussions of
Christianity in books and sermons, and when it comes to practice,
the same supporting of the present idolatry. And is not the same
thing done in Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and every denomination of
Protestantism which has been formed into a church? There is the
same duty laid on their congregations to believe in the dogmas
expressed in the fourth century, which have lost all meaning for
men of our times, and the same duty of idolatrous worship, if not
of relics and ikons, then of the Sabbath Day and the letter of the
Bible. There is always the same activity directed to concealing
the real duties of Christianity, and to putting in their place an
external respectability and cant, as it is so well described by
the English, who are peculiarly oppressed by it. In Protestantism
this tendency is specially remarkable because it has not the
excuse of antiquity. And does not exactly the same thing show
itself even in contemporary revivalism--the revived Calvinism and
Evangelicalism, to which the Salvation Army owes its origin?

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