86 IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE -XII 



the all-powerful and irresponsible vicegerent of God, and 

 all the world outside Russia as given over to Satan, for 

 the reason that it has &quot;rejected the divine principle of 

 authority. 



In various branches of philosophy they have developed 

 doctrines which involve the rejection of the best to which 

 man has attained in science, literature, and art, and a 

 return to barbarism. 



In the theory of life and duty they have devised a pes 

 simistic process under which the human race would cease 

 to exist. 



Every one of these theories is the outcome of some 

 original mind of more or less strength, discouraged, dis 

 heartened, and overwhelmed by the sorrows of Russian 

 life ; developing its ideas logically and without any possi 

 bility of adequate discussion with other men. This alone 

 explains a fact which struck me forcibly the fact that 

 all Tolstoi s love of humanity, real though it certainly is, 

 seems accompanied by a depreciation of the ideas, state 

 ments, and proposals of almost every other human being, 

 and by virtual intolerance of all thought which seems in 

 the slightest degree different from his own. 



Arriving in the Kremlin, he took me to the Church of 

 the Annunciation to see the portrait of Socrates in the 

 religious picture of which he had spoken ; but we were too 

 late to enter, and so went to the Palace of the Synod, 

 where we looked at the picture of the Trinity, which, by a 

 device frequently used in street signs, represents, when 

 looked at from one side, the suffering Christ, from the 

 other the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, and from the 

 front the Almighty as an old man with a white beard. 

 What Tolstoi thought of the doctrine thus illustrated 

 came out in a subsequent conversation. 



The next day he came again to my rooms and at once 

 began speaking upon religion. He said that every man 

 is religious and has in him a religion of his own ; that re 

 ligion results from the conception which a man forms of 

 his relations to his fellow-men, and to the principle which 



