Anna Karenina - Part 8

"Just try and build up anything without those ideas!

"We only try to destroy them, because we're spiritually provided

for. Exactly like the children!

"Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant,

that alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?

"Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life

filled with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me,

full of them, and living on those blessings, like the children I

did not understand them, and destroy, that is try to destroy,

what I live by. And as soon as an important moment of life

comes, like the children when they are cold and hungry, I turn to

Him, and even less than the children when their mother scolds

them for their childish mischief, do I feel that my childish

efforts at wanton madness are reckoned against me.

"Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to

me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the

chief thing taught by the church.

"The church! the church!" Levin repeated to himself. He turned

over on the other side, and leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing

into the distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river.

"But can I believe in all the church teaches?" he thought, trying

himself, and thinking of everything that could destroy his

present peace of mind. Intentionally he recalled all those

doctrines of the church which had always seemed most strange and

had always been a stumbling block to him.

"The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence?

By nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I explain evil?...

The atonement?...

"But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has

been told to me and all men."

And it seemed to him that there was not a single article of faith

of the church which could destroy the chief thing--faith in God,

in goodness, as the one goal of man's destiny.

Under every article of faith of the church could be put the faith

in the service of truth instead of one's desires. And each

doctrine did not simply leave that faith unshaken, each doctrine

seemed essential to complete that great miracle, continually

manifest upon earth, that made it possible for each man and

millions of different sorts of men, wise men and imbeciles, old

men and children--all men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and

kings to understand perfectly the same one thing, and to build up

thereby that life of the soul which alone is worth living, and

which alone is precious to us.