XV.
How often had I envied the peasants their illiteracy and ignorance! From those statements of the faith from which for me resulted apparent absurdities, there resulted nothing false to them; they could accept them and could believe the truth, that truth in which I myself believed. For me, unfortunate man, alone it was evident that the truth was bound up with the lie with thin threads, and that I could not accept it in such a form.
Thus I lived for three years, and at first, when I, like a catechumen, approached truth by degrees, guided only by feeling on my path toward the light, these conflicts did not startle me so much. Whenever I did not understand a thing, I said to myself, “I am guilty, I am bad.” But the more I began to be permeated by the truths which I studied, the more did they become a basis of life, the more oppressive and striking did the conflicts grow, and the sharper did the line stand out between what I did not understand, because I could not understand it, and that which could not be understood otherwise than by lying to myself.
In spite of these doubts and sufferings, I still clung to Orthodoxy. But there appeared questions of life, which it became necessary to solve, and here the solution of these questions by the church—contrary to the very foundations of the faith in which I believed—made me definitely renounce all communion with Orthodoxy. These questions were, in the first place, the relation of the Orthodox Church to the other churches, to Catholi-
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