The ideas which Tolstóy thus slowly worked out are explained in a succession of three separate works: (1) _Dogmatic Theology_, of which the Introduction is better known as _Confession_ and was written in 1882; (2) _What is my Faith?_ (1884); and (3) _What is then to be Done?_ (1886), to which must be added _The Kingdom of God in Yourselves, or Christianity, not as a mystic Teaching but as a new Understanding of Life_ (1900) and, above all, a small book, _The Christian Teaching_ (1902), which is written in short, concise, numbered paragraphs, like a catechism, and contains a full and definite exposition of Tolstóy’s views. A number of other works dealing with the same subject--such as _The Life and the Teachings of the Christ_, _My Reply to the Synod’s Edict of Excommunication_, _What is Religion_, _On Life_, etc., were published during the same year. These books represent the work of Tolstóy for the last twenty years, and at least four of them (_Confession_, _My Faith_, _What is to be Done_, and _Christian Teaching_) must be read in the indicated succession by everyone who wishes to know the religious and moral conceptions of Tolstóy and to extricate himself from the confused ideas which are sometimes represented as Tolstóyism. As to the short work, _The Life and the Teaching of Jesus_, it is, so to speak, the four gospels in one, told in a language easy to be understood, and free of all mystical and metaphorical elements; it contains Tolstóy’s reading of the gospels. These works represent the most remarkable attempt at a rationalistic interpretation of Christianity that has ever been ventured upon. Christianity appears in them devoid of all gnosticism and mysticism, as a purely spiritual teaching about the universal spirit which guides man to a higher life--a life of equality and of friendly relations with all men. If Tolstóy accepts Christianity as the foundation of his faith, it is not because he considers it as a revelation, but because its teaching, purified of all the additions that have been made to it by the churches, contains “the very same solution of the problem of life as has been given more or less explicitly by the best of men, both before and since the gospel was given to us--a succession which goes on from Moses, Isaiah, and Confucius, to the early Greeks, Buddha, and Socrates, down to Pascal, Spinoza, Fichte, Feuerbach, and all others, often unnoticed and unknown, who, taking no teachings on mere trust, have taught us, and spoken to us with sincerity, about the meaning of life”[20]; because it gives “an explanation of the meaning of life” and “a solution of this contradiction between the aspiration after welfare and life, and the consciousness of their being unattainable” (_Chr. Teach._ §13)--“between the desire for happiness and life on the one hand, and the increasingly clear perception of the certainty of calamity and death on the other” (_ibid._, §10).