at fifty years of age there was less likelihood that his passions would divert him from his path. [8] The sub-title of the _Confessions_ is _Introduction to the Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and the Examination of the Christian Doctrine._ [9] "I, who beheld the truth in the unity of love, was struck with the fact that religion itself destroyed that which it sought to produce." (_Confessions_.) [10] "And I am convinced that the teaching of the Church is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a concoction of gross superstitions and witchcraft, under which the meaning of the Christian doctrine absolutely disappears." (_Reply to the Holy Synod,_ April 4-17, 1901.) [11] As he grew older, this feeling of the unity of religious truth throughout human history--and of the kinship of Christ with the other sages, from Buddha down to Kant and Emerson--grew more and more accentuated, until in his later years Tolstoy denied that he had "any predilection for Christianity." Of the greatest importance in this connection is a letter written between July 27 and August 4, 1909, to the painter Jan Styka, and recently reproduced in _Le Théosophe_ (January 16, 1911). According to his habit, Tolstoy, full of his new conviction, was a little inclined to forget his former state of mind and the starting-point of his religious crisis, which was purely Christian: "The doctrine of Jesus," he writes, "is to me only one of the beautiful doctrines which we have received from the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Israel, Hindostan, China, Greece. The two great principles of Jesus: the love of God, that is, of absolute perfection, and the love of one's neighbour, that is, of all men without distinction, have been preached by all the sages of the world: Krishna, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and, among the moderns, Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others. Truth, moral and religious, is everywhere and always the same.... I have no predilection for Christianity. If I have been particularly attracted by the teaching of Jesus, it is (1) because I was born and have lived among Christians, and (2) because I have found a great spiritual joy in disengaging the pure doctrine from the astonishing falsifications created by the Churches." [12] Tolstoy protests that he does not attack true science, which is modest and knows its limits. (_Life,_ chap. iv. There is a French version by Countess Tolstoy.) [13] Tolstoy often read the _Pensées_ during the period of this crisis, which preceded the _Confessions._ He speaks of Pascal in his letters to Fet (April 14, 1877, August 3, 1879), recommending his friend to read the _Pensées._ [14] In a letter _Upon Reason_, written on November 26, 1894, to Baroness X (reproduced in _The Revolutionaries_, 1906), Tolstoy says the same thing: