Transcriber's Notes: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Blank pages have been eliminated. Greek and Hebrew characters have been transliterated to English characters. The transliterations are denoted by [Greek: [Hebrew: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. A few typographical errors have been corrected. MY RELIGION. BY COUNT LEO TOLSTOI. _TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH._ NEW YORK: THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO., 13 ASTOR PLACE. Copyright by THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO., 1885. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. TO one not familiar with the Russian language the accessible data relative to the external life of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi, the author of this book, are, to say the least, not voluminous. His name does not appear in that heterogeneous record of celebrities known as _The Men of the Time_, nor is it to be found in M. Vapereau's comprehensive _Dictionnaire des Contemporains_. And yet Count Leo Tolstoi is acknowledged by competent critics to be a man of extraordinary genius, who, certainly in one instance, has produced a masterpiece of literature which will continue to rank with the great artistic productions of this age. Perhaps it is enough for us to know that he was born on his father's estate in the Russian province of Tula, in the year 1828; that he received a good home education and studied the oriental languages at the University of Kasan; that he was for a time in the army, which he entered at the age of twenty-three as an officer of artillery, serving later on the staff of Prince Gortschakof; and that subsequently he alternated between St. Petersburg and Moscow, leading the existence of super-refined barbarism and excessive luxury, characteristic of the Russian aristocracy. He saw life in country and city, in camp and court. He was numbered among the defenders of Sebastopol in the Crimean War, and the impressions then gathered he used as material for a series of _War Sketches_ that attracted attention in the pages of the magazine where they first appeared; and when, a little later, they were published in book form, their author, then twenty-eight years of age, acquired at once a wide popularity. Popularity became fame with the publication, also in 1856, of _Childhood and Youth_, remarkable alike for its artless revelations concerning the genesis and growth of ideas and emotions in the minds of the young, for its idyllic pictures of domestic life, and for its graceful descriptions of nature. This was followed by _The Cossacks_, a wild romance of the steppes, vigorously realistic in details, and, like all of Count Tolstoi's works, poetic in conception and inspired with a dramatic intensity. In 1860 appeared _War and Peace_, an historical romance in many volumes, dealing with the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 and the events that immediately followed the retreat from Moscow. According to M. C. Courrière,[1] it was seized upon