I'm looking at myself! And here is the spectacle that was depicted before me when I examined myself! This is how I am described indisputably, described with true features, with living colors, described by the very experiences, the very events from my life! What conclusion should I draw about myself from this painting? The conclusion that I am by no means an original and independent being, that I am deprived of the most basic, most vital knowledge of myself. There is a real need, a necessity, that someone should explain me to me more satisfactorily, that he should announce to me my purpose, that he should show me the right activity, and thus protect me from activity without meaning and without purpose.

This urgent need, this necessity, was recognized by God Himself. He recognized it and gave people the Revealed Teaching, which leads us to knowledge that is inaccessible to our own comprehension. In the divinely revealed teaching, God revealed Himself to man, to what extent the unlimited and inexplicable God can be explained and revealed to limited man. In the divinely revealed teaching, God revealed to man the meaning and purpose of man, his relationship to God and to the worlds, visible and invisible. God revealed to man the knowledge of man, as far as this knowledge is accessible to the mind of man. The complete and perfect knowledge of man, like that of every other creature, is possessed by one who is capable of complete and perfect knowledge of all things, the all-perfect God.

Divine revealed teaching, being compared with the knowledge given to man by an accurate examination of himself, is confirmed by this knowledge and confirms it. Knowledge, confirmed by one another, stands before humanity in the bright light of irrefutable truth.

The divine revealed teaching proclaims to me, the experiences of life prove to me that I am a creature of God. I am a creature of my God! I am a slave of my God, a slave wholly subject to the power of God, encompassing, contained by His power, an unlimited power, autocratic in the strict sense of the word. The authority does not consult with anyone, the authority does not give any account of its assumptions and actions to anyone: no one, neither of men nor of the Angels, is able to give advice, or to listen, or to understand the account. From time immemorial His Word was to God [194].

I am a slave of my God, despite the fact that I have been given free will and reason to control my will. My will is free almost only in the choice of good and evil; in other respects it is fenced off everywhere. I can wish it! but my wish, meeting with the opposite will of other people, with the opposite direction of insurmountable circumstances, remains, for the most part, unfulfillable. I can wish for many things, but my own infirmity makes many of my desires fruitless. When a wish remains unfulfilled, especially when the wish seems to be prudent, useful, and necessary, then the heart is struck with sorrow. In accordance with the meaning of the wish, sorrow can increase, often turning into despondency and even despair. What is soothing in the fierce times of spiritual distress, when any human help is either powerless or impossible? The mere consciousness of oneself as a slave and a creature of God calms down; This consciousness alone has such power. As soon as a man says prayerfully to God with all his heart: "Thy will be done unto me, O my Lord," the agitation of the heart subsides. From these words, pronounced sincerely, the most grievous sorrows lose their predominance over man.

What does this mean? This means that man, having confessed himself to be a servant and creature of God, having given himself over entirely to the will of God, immediately enters with his whole being into the realm of holy Truth. Truth brings the right mood to the spirit, to life. He who ascends to the realm of Truth, who submits to the Truth, receives moral and spiritual freedom, receives moral and spiritual happiness. This freedom and this happiness do not depend on people and circumstances.

If ye abide in My word, said the Saviour to the Jews, verily ye shall be My disciples, and ye shall understand the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free. Everyone who commits sin is a servant of sin. For if the Son of God, Who is Self-truth, sets you free, you will be free indeed. Service to sin, falsehood, and vanity is slavery in the full sense of the word, even if it appears outwardly as a brilliant freedom. This slavery is eternal slavery. Only he is completely and truly free who is a true slave of his God.

I plunge even deeper into the examination of myself, and a new spectacle opens up before me. I see a decisive disorder of my own will, disobedience to its reason, and in reason I see the loss of the ability to direct the will correctly, the loss of the ability to act correctly. In a distracted life, this state is little noticed, but in solitude, when solitude is illuminated by the light of the Gospel, the state of disorder of the powers of the soul appears in a vast, gloomy, terrible picture. And it serves as a testimony before me that I am a fallen being. I am a slave of my God, but a slave who has angered God, a servant who is outcast, a slave punished by the hand of God. Divine Revelation also declares me to be so.

My state is a state common to all people. Humanity is a category of creatures languishing in various disasters, executed. It can't be otherwise! Proofs of this furnish me both from without and within me. If I were not an exile on earth, like all my brethren, men, if my earthly life were not a punishment, then why should this whole life be a field of unceasing labor, of unceasing conflict, of insatiable striving, never satisfied by anything? Why should earthly life be the path of suffering alone, sometimes more powerful, sometimes weaker, sometimes felt, sometimes drowned out by the rapture of earthly cares and pleasures? Why should there be diseases and all other misfortunes, private and public? Why should there be quarrels, insults, murders in human society? Why should there be all the various evils, vigilantly fighting against the good, oppressing and persecuting the good, almost always triumphing over the good? Why is each person inwardly poisoned by passions, tormented by them incomparably more than by sorrows from without? Why should there be death, devouring everyone mercilessly? What kind of phenomenon is it – generations, replacing one another, arising from non-existence, entering life for a short time, again plunging forever into the unknown?

What kind of phenomenon is the activity of each generation on earth, as if eternal on it? What kind of phenomenon is this activity, constantly contradicting itself, constantly building with effort, resting on streams of human blood, as if on cement, constantly destroying its work with the same effort, with the same bloodshed?.. The earth is the vale of exile, the vale of uninterrupted disorder and confusion, the vale of the urgent suffering of beings who have lost their primitive dignity and home, who have lost their common sense. People suffer from countless images of suffering in this vale, dark and deep! they suffer both under the yoke of poverty and in the abundance of wealth; they suffer both in squalid huts and in magnificent royal palaces; they suffer from calamities from without, and from that terrible disorder with which the nature of each person within him is afflicted, with which both his soul and body are afflicted, by which his mind is perverted and blinded.

So I guess about myself! To such indisputable, tangible conclusions lead me the experiences of my life and everything that has happened and is happening to all mankind. Divine revelation depicts me in this way, it depicts me with greater certainty, opening to me the gates to the realm of knowledge by the gift of my God, closed gates to which I could only reach, before which I could only stand by the action of my own reasoning. It will be revealed by Divine Revelation that the first man was created by God out of nothing, created in the beauty of spiritual grace, created immortal, alien to evil. This story cannot but be just: I feel myself immortal, and evil is alien to me; I hate him, I am tormented by him, I am carried away by him as a flatterer and as a tyrant. The first man created on earth is taken to the division of heaven called paradise. Here, in the midst of undisturbed bliss, he poisoned himself spontaneously by the taste of evil, in himself and with him he poisoned and destroyed all his descendants. Adam, as this man was called, is stricken with death, that is, with a sin that irretrievably upset man's nature, making him incapable of blessedness. Killed by this death, but not devoid of being, and death is all the more terrible as it is felt, he is cast down to earth in fetters: in coarse, much-suffering flesh, transformed into such a body from a passionless, holy, spiritual body. The earth is cursed for the transgression of man: having lost its primitive state,[196] it has been transformed into the state that the abode of exiles from heaven should have for trampling on God's commandment in heaven. We meet the hostile mood of all visible nature towards us at every step! At every step we meet her reproach, her censure, her disagreement with our behavior! Before man, who rejected obedience to God, the soulless and animate creature rejected obedience! She was submissive to man as long as he remained obedient to God! Now it obeys man by force, persists, often breaks obedience, often crushes its master, cruelly and unexpectedly rebelling against him. The law of the multiplication of the human race, established by the Creator after creation, has not been abolished; but he began to act under the influence of the fall; He has changed, he has become corrupt. Parents were subjected to hostile relations with each other, despite their carnal union [197]; they were subjected to the diseases of birth and the labors of education [198]; children, conceived in the bosom of corruption and in sin [199], come into being victims of death. Sojourn on the surface of the earth, amidst various and numerous languors, is given to each person urgently. After the expiration of the period determined by the incomprehensible God, each person must descend into eternal prison, into hell, formed by the vast interior of the earthly planet. What is humanity, filled with proud dreams of itself, maddened by this vain and false dream? Mankind is rubbish, useless to heaven, swept out of heaven, thrown first to the mouth of the abyss, then gradually plunged into the abyss itself as it multiplies. The abyss is called the abyss: such is it in relation to people. There is no way out of it: the chains of it and the rivets of eternity [200], says the Scriptures.

I heed the message of Divine Revelation and recognize it as true. It is impossible not to recognize it as fair! The infinite God is the all-perfect Good; man differs from Him in infinite difference in essence, but in properties and direction he has placed himself in a position of opposition to God. If man, who is so insignificant before God, is at the same time an adversary of God, then what significance should he have before the holiness and majesty of the Godhead? The meaning of contemptible impurity and filth, according to the testimony of the Scriptures [201]. He must be expelled from the presence of God, as if hidden from the eyes of God.

Divine Revelation teaches man that he is a creature of God and a servant of God, a criminal slave, an outcast creature, creeping and perishing in his fall. Poisoned by communion with the author and parent of evil, with the frenzied and stubborn enemy of God, with the fallen angel, deprived of natural freedom by subjection to this all-evil spirit, man has perverted his natural relationship to God, becoming, like the fallen angel, an enemy of God.

{p. 95}