These words were written in the midst of a terrible spiritual tempest, of which the _Confessions_ are the memory and echo. More than once was Tolstoy thrown to earth, his pinions shattered. But he always persevered. He started afresh. We see him hovering in "the vast, profound heavens," with his two great wings, of which one is reason and the other faith. But he does not find the peace he looked for. Heaven is not without us, but within us. Tolstoy fills it with the tempest of his passions. There he perceives the apostles of renunciation, and he brings to renunciation the same ardour that he brought to life. But it is always life that he strains to him, with the violence of a lover. He is "maddened with life." He is "intoxicated with life." He cannot live without this madness.[2] He is drunk at once with happiness and with unhappiness, with death and with immortality.[3] His renunciation of individual life is only a cry of exalted passion towards the eternal life. The peace which he finds, the peace of the soul which he invokes, is not the peace of death. It is rather the calm of those burning worlds which sail by the forces of gravity through the infinite spaces. With him anger is calm,[4]and the calm is blazing. Faith has given him new weapons with which to wage, even more implacably, unceasing war upon the lies of modern society. He no longer confines himself to a few types of romance; he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies of religion, the State, science, art, liberalism, socialism, popular education, benevolence, pacificism.[5] He strikes at all, delivers his desperate attacks upon all. From time to time the world has sight of these great rebellious spirits, who, like John the Forerunner, hurl anathemas against a corrupted civilisation. The last of these was Rousseau. By his love of nature,[6] by his hatred of modern society, by his jealous independence, by his fervent adoration of the Gospel and for Christian morals, Rousseau is a precursor of Tolstoy, who says of him: "Pages like this go to my heart; I feel that I should have written them."[7] But what a difference between the two minds, and how much more purely Christian is Tolstoy's! What a lack of humility, what Pharisee-like arrogance, in this insolent cry from the _Confessions_ of the Genevese: "Eternal Being! Let a single man tell me, if he dare: I was better than that man!" Or in this defiance of the world: "I say it loudly and fearlessly: whosoever could believe me a dishonest man is himself a man to be suppressed." Tolstoy wept tears of blood over the "crimes" of his past life: "I suffer the pangs of hell. I recall all my past baseness, and these memories do not leave me; they poison my life. Usually men regret that they cannot remember after death. What happiness if it should be so! What suffering it would mean if, in that other life, I were to recall all the evil I have done down here!"[8]