wherever life has been, there also has been
the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the sense of
life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but
continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. If Man did not
believe that he must live for something, he would not live at all. The
idea of an infinite God, of the divinity of the soul, of the union of
men's actions with God--these are ideas elaborated in the infinite
secret depths of human thought. They are ideas without which there
would be no life, without which I myself," said Tolstoy, "would not
exist. I began to see that I had no right to rely on my individual
reasoning and neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the
only answers to the question."

Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in
grossest superstition? It is impossible--but yet their life! their
life! It is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to the question!

Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction--he says it
took him two years to arrive there--that his trouble had not been with
life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the
life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he
had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of
conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. He had been
living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure
lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe in
God, therein lay happiness again.

"I remember," he says, "one day in early spring, I was alone in the
forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened, and my
thought went back to what for these three years it always was busy
with--the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever
come by the idea?

"And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations
towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning.... Why
do I look farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without
whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are one and the
same thing. God is what life is. Well, then! live, seek God, and
there will be no life without him....

"After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than ever,
and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide.
Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But as
insensibly and gradu