During the last decades of his life, the famous novelist Lev Tolstoy had abandoned his profession of a writer, for which everyone admired him and which gave deep pleasure to millions of readers in many countries, for that of a false prophet who undermined the faith of millions in the true meaning of the Gospel. In a series of publications, Tolstoy showed himself a disciple of the German philosopher Schopenhauer, whom he called “the greatest genius among men”, and came to believe with him and Solomon that all is vanity in the face of death. But the greatest influence on him was the rationalism of western civilization; believing that dogma was true only if it agreed with reason (he translated the beginning of St. John’s Gospel thus: “In the beginning was reasoning...”), he denied all the dogmas of the Christian Faith, including the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ, and every miraculous element in the Bible. The only part of the Gospel that he clung to was the Sermon on the Mount – but interpreted in a perverse way that led him to denounce property as theft, sexual activity as evil even in marriage, and all governments, armies and penal systems as unnecessary evils that only engendered further evils. While preaching poverty and love, he failed to practice what he preached in his own life, to the great distress of his wife and family; and while his work in relieving the effects of the Volga famine of 189192 was undoubtedly good, the use he made of the publicity he received from it was no less undoubtedly evil.