Page 1585 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?’ said Lidia
Ivanovna. ‘But that is a false idea. There is no sin for
believers, their sin has been atoned for. Pardon,’ she
added, looking at the footman, who came in again with

another letter. She read it and gave a verbal answer:
‘Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess’s, say.’ ‘For the believer
sin is not,’ she went on.
‘Yes, but faith without works is dead,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, recalling the phrase from the catechism, and
only by his smile clinging to his independence.
‘There you have it—from the epistle of St. James,’ said
Alexey Alexandrovitch, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a
certain reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a
subject they had discussed more than once before. ‘What
harm has been done by the false interpretation of that
passage! Nothing holds men back from belief like that
misinterpretation. ‘I have not works, so I cannot believe,’
though all the while that is not said. But the very opposite
is said.’
‘Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting,’ said
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, ‘those
are the crude ideas of our monks.... Yet that is nowhere
said. It is far simpler and easier,’ she added, looking at
Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which at

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