which I have carried away from that study. If I had not been led by life to the inevitable necessity of faith; if I had not seen that this faith formed the foundation of the life of all men; if this feeling, shattered by life, had not been strengthened anew in my heart; if the foundation of my faith had been only confidence; if there were within me only the faith of which theology speaks (taught to believe), I, after reading these books, not only would have turned an atheist, but should have become a most malignant enemy of every faith, because I found in these doctrines not only nonsense, but the conscious lie of men who had chosen the faith as a means for obtaining certain ends.
The reading of these books has cost me a terrible labour, not so much on account of the effort which I was making in order to understand the connection between the expressions, the one which the people who wrote them saw, as on account of the inner struggle which I had to carry on all the time with myself, in order, as I read these books, to abstain from indignation.
I used up a great deal of paper, analyzing word after word, at first the Symbol of Faith, then Filarét’s Catechism, then the Epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs, then Makári’s Introduction to Theology, and then his Dogmatic Theology. A serious, scientific tone, such as these books, particularly the new ones, like Makári’s Theology, are written in, was impossible during the analysis of these books. It was impossible to condemn or reject the ideas expressed, because it was impossible to catch a single clearly expressed idea. The moment I got ready to take hold of an idea, in order to pass judgment upon it, it slipped away from me, because it was purposely expressed obscurely, and I involuntarily returned to the analysis of the expression of the idea itself,—when it appeared that there was no definite idea; the words had not the meaning which they generally have in language, but a special one,
