Opening Words by David McKay.
People in Russia and in many other countries of the world knew of Leo Tolstoy as a great writer in the 19th Century. He was also a very brave Russian soldier, winning awards for his part in the Crimean War.
At the best time of his life, when everything was going well for him, he started to think about why he was doing all that he had been doing. He could not stop thinking about death, and how it makes everything that we think is important now seem like a waste of time. He wanted to find something that would bring meaning to both life and death. The effect of all this thinking was that he changed his whole way of living.
What he found was not at all difficult to understand; but it seemed to him at times that he was the only person in the world who was saying it. Between 1877 and 1885, Tolstoy studied the story of Jesus and the teachings of the Christian church. The two works in this book, and the story of Jesus in Tolstoy’s own words, are the only important things that he wrote in those years, between the time when he was forty-nine years old and when he was fifty-seven.
Some powerful people in Russia tried to stop people from reading what Tolstoy had to say in these works, but more books were secretly printed by hand in Russia, and others were printed outside of Russia and carried secretly across the borders. These were handed from person to person without Tolstoy’s enemies knowing about it. The Church and the Government had no answer to the arguments that Tolstoy was making against them; and a few years later both the Russian Church and the Russian government were destroyed.
Today, a hundred years later, it seems that the world cannot remember what Tolstoy said, as they cannot remember what Gandhi said, and what Jesus said. We are living in spiritually dark times, when very few people will think seriously about what God wants them to do with their lives, and when almost everyone is out to get all that they can for themselves. Tolstoy promised when he was alive that, if the leaders of the world did not find a faith in God that was bigger than any church or government, they would end up destroying themselves. Today we seem much closer to doing just that.
I had not read these works of Tolstoy before I started to work on changing his writings into Easy English. But as I started to read them, it was like finding a very special friend that I had been looking for all my life. For I too have been through many of the same things that he went through in trying to understand the difference between Christianity and what I call "churchianity". I have come to understand that the worship of religion (churchianity) is the perfect opposite to the worship of God. Like Tolstoy, I do not say this as one who does not believe in God. The opposite is true! It is my deep faith in God that makes it so impossible for me to fit in with the teachings of the Church.
Church teachings often sound spiritual, but a closer look shows that they talk about God without ever seriously trying to obey him. As Peter and Jude put it, they are like dry wells, like clouds in a desert sky. People look to them in hope, but for all their promises, they don't have any real answers.
Christ's teaching about not hitting back was, for Tolstoy, the most important rule to follow in understanding all that Christ taught. But I believe that Tolstoy could have started with any of the teachings of Christ, and he would have found one truth leading to another in much the same way that it happened with him when he followed the rule about not hitting back. What made the difference for him (and for anyone who would want to find real truth) was just that he stopped looking for arguments that would bend the truth to make it fit the way that we live, and he started trying to put the truth into action in his own life. As G. K. Chesterton has said, "It isn't that people have tried Christianity and found that it does not work; it is that people could see that Christianity would not be easy, so they never tried it."
Until we are forced to think deeply about death, most of us will not change the way we live to make it agree with what Christ taught. But the truest of all truths is that we are all going to die one day; and when we do, it will not be important, as Tolstoy said, that we be remembered for our writings, our wealth, or our power. What will be important will be what our Maker thinks of how we used our time here on earth. You can be sure that one of the most important questions he will ask will be what did we do with the teachings of the one so many of us call the Son of God?
I should say that in working on this book, I have used more freedom with Tolstoy's words than I have with other writers. For one thing he says the same thing over and over many times, and I have tried to cut down on some of that. But for another thing, I feel so much a part of what Tolstoy was trying to say that I could not hold back from giving him a little "help" at times. So if your reason for studying Tolstoy is to have a perfect understanding of what he said, it may not be smart to put too much faith in every little word in this book. But if you are more interested in hearing the truth that he was trying to get across, then I believe that this book will be a great help in that direction.