2) A very common mistake: To place the aim of life in the service of people and not in the service of God. Only in serving God, i.e., in doing that which He wants, can you be certain that you are not doing something vain and it is not impossible to choose whom you are to serve. 3) Church Christians do not want to serve God, but want God to serve them. 4) Shakespeare began to be valued when the moral criterion was lost. 5) (For _The Appeal_.) We are so entangled that every one of our steps in life is a participation in evil: in violence, in oppression. We must not despair, but we must slowly disentangle ourselves from those nets in which we are caught; not to tear ourselves through,--that would entangle us worse--but to disentangle ourselves carefully. 6)[193] I am in a very bad physical condition, almost fever, and the black gloom that comes before, but up to now the spiritual is the stronger. Escorted Maude’s colony.[194] Ivan Michailovich is still free.[195] Everything is all right. _Apr. 9. Moscow._ Have been ill. With calmness I thought that I would die. To-day I wrote well on Art. They have taken Ivan Michailovich. There was a search at Dunaev’s.[196] It is all right with the exiles.[197] Outwardly I am entirely calm, inwardly not entirely. It is enough to bear in mind that everything is for the good, and when I bear that in mind as I do now--it is good. _To-day May 3. Yasnaya Polyana._ Almost a month I have made no entries. A bad and sterile month. I cut out and burned that which I wrote in heat.[198] _To-day July 16. Y. P._ It is not one month that I have made no entries, but two and a half. I have lived through much, both the difficult and the good.[199] Have been ill. Very severe pains--I think in the beginning of July.[200] I worked all this time on the essay on art, and the farther I get the better. I finished it and am correcting it from the beginning. Masha married.[201]... We do not quiet, moderate passion, the source of the greatest calamities, but kindle it with all our strength and then we complain that we suffer.... Good letters from Chertkov. A Kiev peasant was here, Shidlovsky.[202] I feel that I am alone--that my life not only does not interest any one, but that they are bored and ashamed that I continue to occupy myself with such trifles. I thought during this time: 1) A type of woman--there are men such also, but mostly it is women who are incapable of seeing themselves, as if their necks were stationary and they could not look back at themselves. It isn’t exactly that they don’t want to repent: but they can’t see themselves. They live as they do and not in another way, because this way seems good to them. And therefore if they do anything it is because it seems good to them. Such people are terrifying. And such people may be intelligent, stupid, good, wicked. When they are stupid and wicked it is terrible.