WALKS AND TALKS WITH TOLSTOI -MARCH, 1894 93 



one of the three persons of the holy and undivided 

 Trinity. &quot; 



The old man s voice, so gentle at first, had steadily risen 

 during this catechism of his, in which he propounded the 

 questions and recited the answers, until this last utterance 

 came with an outcry of horror. The beginning of this 

 catechism was given much after the manner of a boy re 

 citing mechanically the pons asinorum, but the end was 

 like the testimony of an ancient prophet against the sins 

 which doomed Israel. 



This last burst was evidently too much for Tolstoi. 

 He said not a word in reply, but seemed wrapped in over 

 powering thought, and anxious to break away. We walked 

 out with the old Raskolnik, and at the door I thanked him 

 for his kindness ; but even there, and all the way down the 

 long walk through the park, Tolstoi remained silent. As 

 we came into the road he suddenly turned to me and said 

 almost fiercely, &quot;That man is a hypocrite; he can t be 

 lieve that ; he is a shrewd, long-headed man ; how can he 

 believe such trash? Impossible! 77 At this I reminded 

 him of Theodore Parker s distinction between men who 

 believe and men who &quot;believe that they believe,&quot; and 

 said that possibly our Raskolnik was one of the latter. 

 This changed the subject. He said that he had read 

 Parker s biography, and liked it all save one thing, which 

 was that he gave a pistol to a fugitive slave and advised 

 him to defend himself. This Tolstoi condemned on the 

 ground that we are not to resist evil. I told him of the 

 advice I had given to Dobroluboff, a very winning Rus 

 sian student at Cornell University, when he was return 

 ing to Russia to practise his profession as k an engineer. 

 That advice was that he should bear in mind Buckle s idea 

 as to the agency of railways and telegraphs in extending 

 better civilization, and devote himself to his profession of 

 engineering, with the certainty that its ultimate result 

 would be to aid in the enlightenment of the empire ; but 

 never, on any account, to conspire against the govern 

 ment ; telling him that he might be sure that he could do far 



