In ceaseless pursuit of Truth, Tolstoy is led through the most stirring intellectual and moral experiences which modern man has undergone. He is part of all that we have met; from the remotest of European countries, from a moment in the world's thought that is already well behind us, his messages have encircled the globe and modify the living ideas of today. He touched all departments of thought and left none as it had been. He plunged into the nineteenth century warfare of religion and science, found that both parties were priest-ridden and arrogant, and wrested from both the right of the individual to a simple faith and to knowledge free from the cant of the laboratory. The increasing grumble of the contest between privilege and labor--the most portentous war the world has seen and not yet at its crisis--assaulted his ears; he hearkened while most other members of the narrow circle of culture were deaf or indifferent, and he took his stand on the side of the workers against his own rank and kin. He laid bare the motives of war, in which he had drawn a guilty sword, and became a militant champion of peace. The unholy alliance of culture, religion, and civil authority he strove to dissolve by broadsides against each member of the triune tyranny, and so he conceived a new theory of art, a new reading of the gospels, and an anarchism so individual that it excludes most other anarchists. Under the solemnity of marriage and the thin poetry of romance he discerned the cloven hoof of self-indulgence, and he shocked the world with a virile puritanism, so powerful in its terms, so subversive of our timid codes that bashful Morality shrank from her bravest defender. All the main thoroughfares of nineteenth century thought crossed before the doorway of Tolstoy's house. He trafficked with all the passengers, but joined no special group. Even his own disciples he allowed to go their own way; he took no part in their organization and left them to make their own interpretation and their own application of his teachings. Loving all mankind, having sympathetic knowledge of all sorts and conditions of men, he was nevertheless strangely solitary. At the end of his life his devotion to his ideas alienated from his family this most tender, home-loving man.[1] The young idealists of the world left him behind, for they broke out new highways of thought which he could not travel; young Russia sees in him a splendid survival of an elder age of storm and struggle, calls him master but not leader. [1] As this book goes to press, Madam Tolstoy's "Autobiography" is being published in _The Freeman_. Her views of the great man should be illuminating, especially if she does not try to minimize his defects.