develop remarkable situations and conventional
distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape
of a religious prophet has to arise--the Buddha, the Christ, or some
Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoi--to redispel our blindness. Yet,
little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get
more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent
increase.

This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great
content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence,
so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so
save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a
more impersonal way.

Tolstoi's levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of
melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled 'My
Confession,' which led the way to his more specifically religious works.
In his masterpiece 'War and Peace,'--assuredly the greatest of human
novels,--the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little
soldier named Karataieff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that,
in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the
heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character
of the book; and his example evidently is meant by Tolstoi to let God
into the world again for the reader. Poor little Karataieff is taken
prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to
march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from
Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning
against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.

"The more," writes Tolstoi in the work 'My Confession,' "the more I
examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became
that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the
possibility of life.... Contrariwise to those of our own class, who
protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people
receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and
with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could
not be otherwise, and that it is all right so.... The more we live by
our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a
cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer,
and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with