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.

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Some of the people were satisfied with this state, not understanding and not assuming another state, finding pleasure in the service of sin; others, guided by God and the remnant of their good will, entered into an intensified struggle with sin, but could not cleanse nature from unnatural admixture, from evil, could not break the shackles of slavery and throw off the yoke of sin and death. Only the Creator of nature could restore nature.

Mankind languished in terrible slavery for more than five thousand years under the incomprehensible judgment of God; it languished in slavery, abundantly filled the prisons of hell, having received from God the promise of liberation at the very hour of falling into slavery. There is one day before the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day [204]. The promise is pronounced together with the utterance of the punishment for the transgression. Mankind has been vouchsafed this promise, because the cause of the fall was deception and infatuation, and not a deliberate and deliberate design. At the end of five thousand years, the Redeemer, the incarnate God, descended to earth to the exiles in the land of exile. He visited both the threshold of our prison – the surface of the earth, and the prison itself – hell. He granted salvation to all men, leaving it to their free will either to accept salvation or to reject it. He set free all who believed in Him: He raised up those imprisoned in the subterranean abyss to heaven, and those who wandered on the earthly surface He brought into communion with God, breaking their communion with Satan. The God-Man, having taken upon Himself all the consequences of man's fall, except for sin, also took upon Himself the image of earthly life, corresponding to the fallen and outcast, punished by God's justice, aware of his fall, confessing God's justice with good-natured patience with all allowances. In His activity He showed a model for the activity of each person in the field of his earthly life.

The Gospel presents to our eyes two distinctive features in the activity of the Saviour: the most precise fulfillment of the will of God in matters that depend on arbitrariness, and complete obedience to the will of God in the destinies of God. "I have come down from heaven," said the Lord, "that I may not do My will, but the will of the Father who sent Me" [205]. The cup which the Father has given Me, shall you not drink it? [206] The God-Man expressed the most exact fulfillment of the will of God and obedience to the destinies of God with His entire life. The great virtue, the beginning of all virtues, lost by Adam in heaven – the virtue of obedience to God – was brought from heaven to earth by the God-Man to men languishing in perdition caused by disobedience to God. This virtue was especially manifested in all its greatness when the Lord perceived the fierce sufferings. He, in the image of God, without ceasing to be God, humbled Himself, took the form of a servant, being in the likeness of a man, and was found in the likeness of a man: He humbled Himself, being obedient even unto death, even the death of the cross [207]. Because of such complete obedience to God, the Lord was the only true Servant of God by His human nature [208]. He was an all-perfect Servant of God, who never deviated from fulfilling the will of God and from obedience to this will. Not one of the righteous people has fulfilled this most sacred duty of man before God satisfactorily and unfailingly.

To the assembly of the Jews the Lord declared: "I do not seek My will, but the will of Him who sent Me the Father" (209). Before His descent into the life-giving sufferings and death on the Cross, the Lord revealed in Himself the weakness of fallen man before the fates of God punishing him. He began to grieve and grieve [210]. He deigned to reveal the anguish of His soul to His chosen disciples: "My soul is sorrowful unto death," He said to them. He fell on His faces [212], and was raised by mankind to such an intensified podvig, that His sweat was like drops of blood dropping on the ground [213]. In spite of such a tense state into which the human nature of the God-Man was led, His prayer expressed both the presence of the human will in Him and the complete submission in Him of the human will to the will of God. The prayer of the God-Man, pronounced by Him before His departure to suffering, is a spiritual, precious heritage for the entire Christian race: it is capable of shedding consolation on the soul languishing under the burden of the most grievous sorrows. "My Father," said the Lord in His prayer, "if it is possible to eat, let this cup pass from Me: not as I will, but as Thou wilt" [214]; neither is My will, but Yours be done. The Lord called the chalice of God's destiny. This cup is given by God to man for his salvation.

The God-Man deigned to take upon Himself the death on the cross and the outrages, torments, and tortures that preceded it arbitrarily. As the Son of God and God, having one will with the Father and the Spirit, He laid the penalty on Himself, on the innocent of sin, on the Son of Man and together with the Son of God, for the redemption of the guilty of the sins of mankind. To him who attempted to use human means in His defense, in opposition to the destinies of God, He said: Return Thy sword [knife] to its place. Or do you think that I cannot now beseech My Father, and the Angel will present Me with more than twenty legens? How will the Scriptures be fulfilled, in which the decree of God is depicted, as it befits it? [216] The Lord expressed the same concept of the action of God's immutable destinies before Pilate. The proud Roman, offended by the silence of the Lord, said, "Do you not speak to me? Do you not know that it is the power of the Imam to crucify Thee, and the power of the Imam to let Thee go? The Lord answered him: "Thou hast no power against Me, unless it be given from above" (217). The destinies of God are at work, the power of God is at work: you are an instrument that does not understand yourself. But the instrument is endowed with reason and free will: it is convinced of this, and expresses it with impudence and vanity. It acted without any understanding of God's destinies, it acted freely and arbitrarily: its action is declared a sin, which has its weight and measure at the judgment of God.

Resistance to the destinies of God is reckoned among satanic undertakings. When the Lord foretold His disciples about the sufferings and violent death that awaited Him, Peter began to sing Him, saying to Him: "Thou art merciful, O Lord, Thou shalt not have this to be." And he turned to the words of Peter: "Follow me, Satan, thou art a temptation of Me: for thou thinkest not, which is God's, but man's" [219]. Peter was moved, apparently, by a good feeling; but it acted from the way of thinking and from the good that belong to fallen human nature. Hostile to the will of God and to the all-holy good that proceeds from God are the reason and good of fallen human nature; they condemn and condemn the destinies of God. The human mind and will, in their blindness, are ready to oppose and oppose the destinies and decrees of God, not understanding that such an undertaking is an absurd undertaking, it is a struggle of the most limited, insignificant creature with the omnipotent and all-perfect God.

You do not understand the times and the years which the Father has set in His power [220], said the Lord to the Apostles, when they asked Him about the time in which the kingdom of Israel was to be formed. This answer of the Lord is the answer to all the questions of human curiosity and pride about the fate of God. It is not yours, O men, that which God hath placed in His power! You have an understanding that corresponds to your mind; it is not characteristic of you to understand the thought of the Infinite Mind.