English

To God Or To Mammon by Lev Tolstoy

“There is an old story about a monk who lost a bet to the devil and had to do what the devil would order him. And so the devil gave the monk a choice of three crimes: murder, fornication, or drunkenness. The monk chose drunkenness, thinking that if he gets intoxicated he would harm only himself. But when the liquor took over him, he lost control of his reason, went to the village and there, yielding to a temptation of a woman, he committed adultery with her, and then committed a murder by defending himself from her husband, who returned and attacked him.” Whoever you are, you cannot stay between two camps anymore, you unavoidably must choose one of the two: to oppose drunkenness or cooperate with it – serve God or mammon.

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