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thine is the decision." In line with this, intercessory and supplicatory prayer is not to be considered necessary, since we are part of God.

The prohibition of the use of "vain repetitions" in prayer (St. Matt. 6:7) is extended to all formal prayers in which we make use of the words of other men, unless our spiritual state corresponds exactly to that in which they were at the time when they first made this prayer. We are therefore not to pray at definite hours of the day but only at those periods when our consciousness of God is so intense that we make progress in our spiritual life. Besides this there should be constant prayer, i. e., remembrance of the presence of God so as to assist us in our struggle against sin.

For a Christian Tolstoy's attitude toward sin is very unsatisfactory. The author cannot admit the Atonement, or the Sacraments. He refuses likewise to permit prayer to God for the strengthening of man in his struggle against sin. The difficulty of the situation is increased by the fact that a man recognizing a certain act as sinful desires to become holy at once, but all great changes as in the material, so in the spiritual world, come by slow development. Therefore a man recognizing the sinfulness of his life should begin gradually to root out these sins by a constant remembrance of God and by constantly avoiding occasions for sin. It goes without saying that the chief sins for a Christian are contained in violations of the Five Commandments set forth in the Sermon on the Mount, and Tolstoy carefully states in which order the sins committed against these are to be fought, while the man continues to indulge in the others but not more seriously until the time for them to be opposed comes.

The goal of all this religion is love, love for God of

Whom we are a part, and for our neighbors and all mankind, as also parts of God. We should sacrifice as willingly for strangers as for friends, for peoples whom we do not know as for relatives, because all persons whom we are bound to aid according to the rules of the world, as parents, children, friends, etc., we assist not because we love them in God but because they minister to our comfort. In other words, they contribute to the well-being of our transient ego, and in assisting them we are satisfying our lower instincts and not fulfilling the will of God. Love is always in the present, and any call, no matter how unimportant, must never be refused because we expect a serious call in the future. Love can never be postponed.

Of course the Sacraments are unhesitatingly rejected as foolish inventions of the Church, and when Tolstoy explains Christ's teaching on Baptism in the conversation with Nicodemus, he carefully omits all mention of the water of Baptism. Similarly the Holy Eucharist is proved impossible, unless Christ meant that the Apostles were to give their own body and blood to their disciples. In a word, Tolstoy endeavored to see how many blasphemous suggestions he could find in the New Testament, so as to attack the Church.

It seems hardly worth while to add criticisms of similar character on the idolatry of the Church as manifested by the use of ikons and the invocation of saints. They are merely such as we would expect from the manner in which Tolstoy handled Christ Himself. Of course all these "superstitions" are to be cast out root and branch.

The various charges brought against the Church and the Christian system of theology are grouped by Tolstoy under five heads, as follows: The Church has tolerated and preached belief in the supernatural and has taught that

the clergy receive by ordination certain powers and grace from God, when they are well aware that Christ never founded any Church. It has fostered belief in miracles performed by Christ and others as proof of the supernatural claims which it has advanced and thereby has spurned our God-given faculty of reasoning. It has separated man from God by interposing a mediator between God and man and has declared a normal man Christ to be the Son of God and a necessary intercessor between man and God in defiance of the clear words of Christ Himself. The Church, apostles, prophets, saints, etc., are also needless mediators for Christianity and play the same role as the dervishes, Buddhas, and lamas of other religions. It has tolerated and approved external forms, prayers, sacraments, sacrifices, beautiful churches with costly decorations, magnificent music, and many other devices, and has tried to deceive the people into thinking that these things form part of true religion. But the last and most cruel of all these sins is the pernicious influence which the Church has exerted upon the young and the children, for instead of telling them the truth, it has given to them the ideas of people who lived hundreds of years previously and has told them such manifest untruths as that Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, made the world and came down to earth, to atone with his blood for the sin of Adam, and the older people have not scrupled to fill the young minds of children with these tales which they themselves know to be false, and therein they have done the same wrong that the Jews, Moslems, and Buddhists do, when they explain to their children the distinctive truths of their religions.

Such, in short, are the outlines of the religious system advocated by Tolstoy. He repudiated Orthodox Christianity, he repudiated the Deity of Christ, the Sacraments, the

Church, everything. He was really a confessed pantheist, an avowed admirer of only that portion of Christianity which was in harmony with the ethical systems of other religions. In other words, the content of real religion was to be found by taking the highest common factor of all of the great religious systems of the world, systems ranging from Christianity to Animism. The whole was carried out by a relentless and arbitrary method of Biblical criticism which permitted the excision of any passage which was not considered to be in harmony with his conception of the whole.

Can Christianity profit from the theological writings of Count Tolstoy, as distinguished from his ethical productions, which we have not considered in this paper? It is hard to see what party can respect them. Any believer in the historic Church must reject them instantly because of their blasphemous comments on the Church and the Sacraments. But the Evangelical Christian can no more be content with them. Belief in the Incarnation and the Atonement is criticized as harshly and condemned as strongly as are the doctrines of the Invocation of Saints and of the Apostolic Succession. If we consider the theological aspects of his works, Leo Tolstoy can hardly be called a Christian in the usual sense of that word, since he is hardly more than a religious rationalist. We would probably be hardly unjust in calling him a religious Bolshevik, and whatever views one may hold as to the spiritual or unspiritual character of the former Holy Synod of Russia, no real believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity as it has been handed down by the overwhelming majority of all Christian bodies, can fail to approve of their final excommunication of this blasphemous critic of the most sacred doctrines of Christianity.

The Function of the Theological Sem

W

inary

BY THE REV. NEIL E. STANLEY.

ANTED, a definition. Why is a Seminary? No one seems precisely to know. It presents one of the definitely strategic situations in the Church. Most of our present clergy came from it. I carefully avoid saying that they were trained by it, because so many of them deny that they were. The Seminary is not a failure, though that is not by any means equivalent to saying that it is a success, for success it emphatically is not.

The truly surprising amount of interest displayed in the recent effort to draft a new Education Canon to be submitted to General Convention was perhaps a symptom. Perhaps too it is symptomatic that it should have manifested itself last summer in open letters to the Church papers-letters not about the Canon at all, but about the Seminaries.

When people write open letters they write them because the open letter is a sort of safety valve for discontent. When the ecclesiastically discontented wrote about the Seminaries they faulted a great many things, but I venture to think that what they were really trying to get at is a condition, the condition, doubtless, that Father Carey had in mind when he referred to the Clergy of the Church of England as the best educated and the poorest trained in Christendom. This is true of us-with a difference. Our Clergy are not quite so well educated as the English, and are a trifle better trained.

In localizing the difficulty the place of the Seminaries is rather obvious. The delinquencies of the Priesthood will inevitably be laid to their charge quite regardless of

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