"Searchin', searchin' for my baby......searchin', searchin', for my love."

I was happy to learn your opinion (if I understood it rightly) according to which conversion rarely occurs instantaneously, but that pain and suffering are on its path. I was happy, because I myself have gone through a long and painful inner labour. I know that these pains and sufferings are the best I have experienced so far in my life and that they must have their reward, if not in the soothing quiet of faith, then at least in the awareness of the price I paid for them. The theory that God's Grace descends upon one, in the English clubs or in an assembly of stockbrokers, I always considered not only stupid, but also immoral.

You say you do not know in what I myself believe. Strange and terrible to say: I believe in nothing, nothing that is being taught by religion, and at the same time I not only hate, but despise unbelief. I don't see how one can live and still less how one can die without faith. I am gradually constructing my own beliefs, yet however firm I may be about them, they are not very firm and not very consoling. When my reason questions, their answer is satisfactory; but when my heart suffers and needs an answer, it receives from them neither support nor comfort.

The demands of my reason and the answers given by the Christian religion could be compared with two hands anxious to join each other but whose fingers refuse to do so. I am craving for their union, but he more I try to join them, the worse it gets. Yet I know that it can be done and that they are made for one another. --letter from Tolstoy to Countess Alexandra Tolstaya April 1876