Testament and the holiness of David, who on his deathbed orders the killing of an old man who has offended him and whom he could not kill himself, because he was bound by an oath, and similar abominations, of which the Old Testament is full, cannot believe in Christ’s moral law; a man who believes in the doctrine and the preaching of the church about the compatibility of executions and wars with Christianity, cannot believe in the brotherhood of men.
Above all else, a man who believes in the salvation of men through faith, in redemption, or in the sacraments, can no longer employ all his strength in the fulfilment in life of the moral teaching of Christ.
A man who is taught by the church the blasphemous doctrine about his not being able to be saved by his own efforts, but that there is another means, will inevitably have recourse to this means, and not to his efforts, on which he is assured it is a sin to depend. The church doctrine, any church doctrine, with its redemption and its sacraments, excludes Christ’s teaching, and the Orthodox doctrine, with its idolatry, does so especially.