Thus are men’s lives levelled up as well as levelled down,—­levelled up in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness and show.  Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional distinctions and merits.  And then always some new leveller in the shape of a religious prophet has to arise—­the Buddha, the Christ, or some Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoi—­to redispel our blindness.  Yet, little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent increase.

This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great content.  I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence, so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so save time.  But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a more impersonal way.

Tolstoi’s levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled ’My Confession,’ which led the way to his more specifically religious works.  In his masterpiece ’War and Peace,’—­assuredly the greatest of human novels,—­the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier named Karataieff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that, in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character of the book; and his example evidently is meant by Tolstoi to let God into the world again for the reader.  Poor little Karataieff is taken prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from Moscow.  The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.

“The more,” writes Tolstoi in the work ‘My Confession,’ “the more I examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the possibility of life....  Contrariwise to those of our own class, who protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could not be otherwise, and that it is all right so....  The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.  We see only a cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer, and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with joy....  There are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of life.