He never recanted. He never changed his attitude towards the errors and wrongs of the Russian orthodox church. And no one who ever stood and talked with him, face to face, could ever have believed that that modern Prometheus, that stern and fearless personality, that re-incarnation of Mattathias of old, and of his valiant sons, the Maccabees, could ever swerve from a position once taken by him. When upon his death-bed, he was frequently importuned to return as a penitent to the mother-church; he spurned every mention of it. He was still in the possession of his senses, he said, he still knew and believed that twice two equals four, and as long as he knew and believed this so long would he continue to know and to believe that what he had said and written concerning the errors and wrongs of the church was the truth. Never a truer follower of Jesus than he. It is noteworthy, and quite in keeping with the general tenor of the Russian orthodox church, that no cognizance was taken by the church of the many noble things Tolstoy had said and written and done; no cognizance of the self-sacrificing efforts he had made to live the life which Jesus had lived and had enjoined upon his followers; no cognizance of his having conscientiously endeavored to square his life with the teachings of the _Sermon on the Mount_; no cognizance of his having brought light to those in darkness and comfort to those in sorrow, of his having consorted and labored with the poor and lightened their burden, of his having thirsted and hungered after righteousness, of his having sought peace and protested against war, and preached the gospel of the wrongfulness of all physical resistance, of his having, though of the oldest nobility, spurned luxury and ease and even money, having regarded these the source of corruption and the root of many of the evils in society. Yet refused Christian burial. Such a person, and one even but half as good as this, should have been entitled to sepulture in the most sacred of Christian cemeteries, and the most eminent of priests should have deemed it a privilege to have been permitted to perform the last rites over his mortal remains. So would it have happened among rational people, but so could it not have happened in Russia. There, because he could not subscribe to doctrines and rites and ceremonies for which he found neither scriptural nor rational warrant, priests felt themselves disgraced, and in danger of eternal damnation, even when their names were associated with that of Tolstoy.