Old age sometimes brings loss of faith or renewed faith. In the case of three giants of European culture-Milton, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy-it brought both: They turned against institutional religion, but in the name of God and Bible. Brief outlines indicate how they reach this position. They differed crucially on who was Jesus and on what is the Bible. They agree, however, that the Church downplays the difficulty of being a Christian, seeks power, allies itself with the state, splinters easily, and resorts to widespread mendacity, especially on the importance of ritual and on the relevance of a priestly class. Bearing witness to a true piety in a world of allegedly shallow or fake Christianity, these three men are in the line of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus, and, like them, are engaged in a task that sometimes seems more Sisyphean than Herculean.
