Government used church for discrediting Tolstoy. Speaking in our last discourse of the church's excommunication of Tolstoy, and of its refusing a resting place to his remains in what she calls "consecrated ground," we said that the Czar is the spiritual as well as the temporal head of the Church of Russia, and that the hated of the church is yet more the hated of the government. This statement explains what otherwise is difficult to understand, namely, how so good a man as Tolstoy, who, for more than two score years, strove to square his life with the teachings of the _Sermon on the Mount_, could have incurred the hatred of the Russian orthodox Church. The government had far more reason to hate Tolstoy than had the church. Finding it impolitic to proceed directly against him, it availed itself of the church for discrediting Tolstoy in the eyes of the credulous populace. Before giving reason why. Before entering upon a discussion as to why the government feared Tolstoy, we must first have a glimpse of his earlier years, and briefly follow his heroic self-extrication from the corruption of the aristocratic society into which he was born, and his gradual rise to the exalted station of greatest reformer in the history of Russia. Must hear story of his life. He was born eighty-two years ago of an ancient noble family. His childhood years were spent in the midst of the gay military life of Moscow. Yet more gay and more corrupt was the society that surrounded him during his university life. Experiencing a revulsion of feeling against the kind of life he was leading, he fled from the university before graduation, returned to his family estate at Yasnaya Polyana and took up the life of a farmer. This impetuous flight, and a later one of which we shall hear presently, may throw some light upon his last flight, a few weeks ago, which came to a pathetic end, and of which we shall speak in our next discourse. His early glory and shame.