"Then what am I still searching for? a voice cried within me. For Him, without whom man cannot live! To know God and to live—it is the same thing! For God is Life....
"Since then this light has never again deserted me."[6]
He was saved. God had appeared to him.[7]
But as he was not a Hindu mystic, to whom ecstasy suffices; as to the dreams of the Asiatic was added the thirst for reason and the need of action of the Occidental, he was moved to translate his revelation into terms of practical faith, and to draw from the holy life the rules of daily existence. Without any previous bias, and sincerely wishing to believe in the beliefs of his own flesh and blood, he began by studying the doctrine of the Orthodox Church, of which he was a member.[8] In order to become more intimately a part of that body he submitted for three years to all its ceremonies; confessing himself, communicating; not presuming to judge such matters as shocked him, inventing explanations for what he found obscure or incomprehensible, uniting himself, through and in their faith, with all those whom he loved, whether living or dead, and always cherishing the hope that at a certain moment "love would open to him the gates of truth." But it was all useless: his reason and his heart revolted. Such ceremonies as baptism and communion appeared to him scandalous. When he was forced to repeat that the host was the true body and true blood of Christ, "he felt as though a knife were plunged into his heart." But it was not the dogmas which raised between the Church and himself an insurmountable wall, but the practical questions, and in especial two: the hateful and mutual intolerance of the Churches[9] and the sanction, formal or tacit, of homicide: of war and of capital punishment.
So he broke loose, and the rupture was the more violent in that for three years he had suppressed his faculty of thought. He walked delicately no longer. Angrily and violently he trampled underfoot the religion which the day before he was still persistently practising. In his Criticism of Dogmatic Theology (1879-1881) he termed it not only an "insanity, but a conscious and interested lie."[10] He contrasted it with the New Testament, in his Concordance and Translation of the Four Gospels (1881-83). Finally, upon the Gospel he built his faith (What my Faith consists in, 1883).
It all resides in these words:
"I believe in the doctrine of the Christ. I believe that happiness is possible on earth only when all men shall accomplish it."
Its corner-stone is the Sermon on the Mount, whose essential teaching Tolstoy expresses in five commandments:
"1. Do not be angry.