This ideal he was not able to carry out in practice. His family, his wife, opposed him: and he was not strong enough to face the uncompromising and terrible sayings which speak of a man’s foes being those of his own household, of father being divided against son, and household against household, of the dead being left to bury their dead. He put before him the ideal of the Christian saints, and of the early Russian martyrs who literally acted upon the saying of Christ: “Whoso leaveth not house and lands and children for My sake, is not worthy of Me.” Tolstoy, instead of crushing the spider of property, shut his eyes to it. He refused to handle money, or to have anything to do with it; but this does not alter the fact that it was handled for him, so that he retained its advantages, and this without any of the harassment which arises from the handling of property. His affairs were, and still are, managed for him; and he continued to live as he had done before. No sane person would think of blaming Tolstoy for this. He was not by nature a St. Francis; he was not by nature a Russian martyr, but the reverse. What one does resent is not that his practice is inconsistent with his teaching, but that his teaching is inconsistent with the ideal which it professes to embody. He takes the Christian teaching, and tells the world that it is the only hope of salvation, the only key to the riddle of life. At the same time he neglects the first truth on which that teaching is based, namely, that man must be born again; he must humble himself and become as a little child. It is just this final and absolute surrender that Tolstoy has been unable to make. Instead of loving God through himself, and loving himself for the God in him, he hates himself, and refuses to recognise the gifts that God has given him. It is for this reason that he talks of all his great work, with the exception of a few stories written for children, as being worthless. It is for this reason that he ceased writing novels, and attempted to plough the fields. And the cause of all this is simply spiritual pride, because he was unwilling “to do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him.” Providence had made him a novelist and a writer, and not a tiller of the fields. Providence had made him not only a novelist, but perhaps the greatest novelist that has ever lived; yet he deliberately turns upon this gift, and spurns it, and spits upon it, and says that it is worth nothing.