Jailers and superintendents of hard-labor convicts for the most part become defenders of those whom they are supposed to torture. He refuses, pointing out the definite place in the Gospel where taking an oath is prohibited. In the name of the state they demand of me the renunciation of everything which may be dear to man, of peace, of family, of security, of human dignity. Here are the details of one of the first cases (since then these refusals have become more and more frequent), with which I am acquainted. The French writer, Alphonse Karr, now forgotten, has said somewhere, when speaking of the impossibility of abolishing capital punishment, “Que Messieurs les assassins commencent par nous donner l’exemple” [let the murderers show us the way to abolition by their example] and many times after that have I heard the repetition of this joke by men who thought that with these words they gave a conclusive and clever argument against the abolition of capital punishment. No; the participation in elections, in the court, or in the government, is a participation in governmental violence. The same is true in all other crimes. In a still greater contradiction and in still greater sufferings lives the man of the so-called cultured class. Involuntarily one asks himself: “How can men permit such things to happen, if not for the sake of higher considerations of state, at least for the sake of their security?”. Liberty cannot be granted to a Christian or to Christians, or taken from them. ©2020 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. In such a condition all those unfortunate rulers, ministers, members of parliaments, governors, generals, officers, bishops, clergymen, even rich men are now partly and soon will be completely. These people look differently at the matter, but all of them discuss war as an incident which is quite independent of the will of men who take part in it, and so do not even admit that natural question, which presents itself to every simple man, “Must I take part in it?” According to the opinion of all these men, these questions do not even exist, and every person, no matter how he himself may look upon war, must in this respect slavishly submit to the demands of the government. May he voluntarily give money, to aid the government, which is supported by military forces, capital punishment, and violence in general? “All this is unjust,” they say; “nobody compels the people to work for the proprietors and in factories. I again entered among the crowd, stood, looked, asked questions, and marvelled at the freedom with which this most terrible crime is perpetrated in broad daylight and in a populous city. In reference to the fourth point, as to how heretics are made, he says in one of his questions (the seventh): “Does not all history show that the greatest makers of heretics and the masters of this work were those same wise men from whom the Father has hidden His secrets, that is, the hypocrites, Pharisees, and lawyers, or entirely godless and corrupt people?” Questions 20 and 21: “And did not, in the most corrupt times of Christianity, the hypocrites and envious people reject those very men who were particularly endowed by God with great gifts, and who in the time of pure Christianity would have been highly esteemed? Peace be with all who seek peace, and all-conquering love be the imperishable inheritance of every soul, which voluntarily submits to the Law of Christ: “Resist not evil.”. The Christian church is hypocritical because it preaches the principles of Jesus but does not follow them. A Christian does not quarrel with any one, does not attack any one, nor use violence against one; on the contrary, he himself without murmuring bears violence; but by this very relation to violence he not only frees himself, but also the world from external power. The ideal is never, under any condition, to make use of violence; the commandment which points out the degree below which it is absolutely possible not to descend is not to repay evil with evil, but to suffer insult, to give up one’s cloak. The aggregate national debts of Europe, by far the larger proportion of which has been contracted for war purposes, amount at the present time to £4,680,000,000....”. The recruit wants to say something again. Who has led them into this remarkable delusion? But it is this recognition that what to us appears evil is evil, or an absolute failure to comprehend the question, which serves as a foundation for the judgment of the lay critics concerning the Christian teaching, so that the opinions concerning my book, both of the ecclesiastic and the lay critics, showed me that the majority of men absolutely fail to comprehend, not only Christ’s very teaching, but even those questions to which it serves as an answer. They strive to maintain the orders that are based on the social life-conception, but themselves do not believe in it, because it is obsolete, and it is impossible to believe in it any longer. There are truths which have long ago been recognized by a man himself or have been transmitted to him by education and tradition, and have been taken by him on faith, the execution of which has become to him a habit, a second nature; and there are truths which present themselves to him indistinctly, in the distance. 28). The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a nonfiction book written by Leo Tolstoy. v. 39) in all its significance, as this was understood by the Quakers, with whom Garrison stood in friendly relations. The Congress expresses its satisfaction at the adoption by the Spanish Senate, on June 16th last, of a project of law authorizing the Government to negotiate general or special treaties of arbitration for the settlement of all disputes, except those relating to the independence and internal government of the States affected; also at the adoption of resolutions to a like effect by the Norwegian Storthing... and by the Italian Chamber, on July 11th. And so this merchant, who frequently, in addition, performs a whole series of direct rascalities, by selling bad wares for good ones, cheating in weights and measures, or trading exclusively in articles which are pernicious to the people’s health (such as wine or opium), boldly considers himself, and is considered by others, so long as he in business does not directly cheat his fellows in deception, that is, his fellow merchants, to be a model of honesty and conscientiousness. Thus, despite the fact that the power remains externally the same that it was, there is with every change of men in power a greater increase in the number of men who by experience are brought to the necessity of accepting the Christian life-conception, and with every change the coarsest, most cruel, and least Christian of all enter into the possession of the power, but they are such as are constantly less coarse and cruel and more Christian than their predecessors. The advantages of the social life consist in the security of property and labor and in the cooperation in the aggregate perfection of life — the universal military service destroys all that. They do not believe that Christ wanted to say what he did; or it seems to them that what he said in the Sermon on the Mount and in other passages He said from infatuation, from lack of comprehension, from insufficient development. A spiritual influence is an action upon a man, such that in consequence of it the very desires of a man are changed and coincide with what is demanded of him. All this is considered an obligatory faith for everybody. These men have a past, and friends, and their manner of thinking and acting is known; all know them as meek, good, peaceful men, and it is impossible to declare them to be malefactors who ought to be removed for the safety of society. The same is asserted by a peasant in Tver, in Támbov. All the young men of all Europe are year after year subjected to this trial, and with the rarest exceptions they all renounce everything which is and can be sacred to a man, they all express their readiness to kill their brothers, even their fathers, at the command of the first erring man who is clad in a red livery embroidered with gold, and all they ask is when and whom to kill. He then recounts the efforts of many individuals and groups in Europe and the United States who have spoken out against war and have urged people to live according to Christ’s teachings. “Entrons au palais de la guerre” [Let’s enter the Palace of War]. Nice is added to France, Lorraine to Germany, Bohemia to Austria; Poland is divided; Ireland and India are subjected to English rule; war is waged against China and the Africans; the Americans expel the Chinese, and the Russians oppress the Jews; the landowners use the land which they do not work, and the capitalists make use of the labors of others, not because this is good, useful, and needful to men and because the contrary is evil, but because those who are in power want it to be so. He is poorly and dirtily dressed and looks frightened, and the muscles of his face tremble, and his fugitive eyes sparkle, and in a faltering voice, almost in a whisper, he says: “I — according to the law I, a Christian — I cannot —”. All the church preachers know cases when this commandment may be broken. Once I was present in Moscow at some discussions about faith, which, as usual, took place during Quasimodo week near a church in Okhotny Ryad. The same is now taking place in our humanity in the transition from the pagan conception of life to the Christian, which is now going on. Whoever rules is as much obliged to avoid war as a captain of a boat is obliged to avoid a shipwreck. This means has been employed since remote antiquity, especially by those men who usurped the power, and men for a long time did not see the irrationality of this means. A. A man of the ancient world could consider himself in the right to use the benefits of this world to the disadvantage of other men, causing them to suffer for generations, because he believed that men are born of various breeds, noble and base, of the generation of Japheth and of Ham. But no! Such was the attitude which the ecclesiastics, that is, those who profess Christ’s faith, assumed toward me. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. We shall see a new Europe formed, on bases that are so unjust, so brutal, so bloody, so soiled with a monstrous blotch, that it cannot help but be worse than that of today — more iniquitous, more barbarous, more violent. All this is not only harmless, but even useful to the governments, in that it takes people’s minds away from the most essential question, as to whether each individual man, who is called to become a soldier, should perform the universal military service or not. The critics upon my books, both the Russian and the foreign critics, can be divided into two classes: into the religious critics — people who consider themselves to be believers — and lay critics, who are freethinkers. [12] he is talking of the establishment of an international tribunal, [13] you may substitute the word “Europe”. The governments will decide to submit their differences to a court of arbitration and so will disband their armies. From the press, we shall promulgate our sentiments as widely as practicable. Explaining why people continue to be exploited by government and the privileged classes, Tolstoy asserts that people are hypnotized by tradition and secular and religious teaching as well as by habit, continuing to do what has been done for centuries, even if doing so means continuing to be exploited, to live in poverty and slavery, and to serve a cruel and ruthless government. They believed firmly that their law (which for the most part was also religious) was the one true law which all men must obey. For every man there always are truths, invisible to him, which have not yet been revealed to his mental vision; there are other truths, already outlived, forgotten, and made his own; and there are certain truths which have arisen before him in the light of his reason and which demand his recognition. “For this process of the Christianization of all men to take place, for all men one after another to pass over from the pagan concept of life to the Christian, and voluntarily renounce power and wealth, and for no one to desire to make use of them, it is necessary that not only all those rude, semisavage men, who are entirely incapable of adopting Christianity and following it, and of whom there are always such a great number amidst every Christian society, but also all savage and non-Christian nations in general, of whom there are so many outside the Christian society, should be made Christian. But the hypocrisy of the men of our time far surpasses the comparatively innocent hypocrisy of the Pharisees. The author obviously recognizes Christ’s teaching in its real significance. The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy Pt. Unable to part from their wealth during their lifetime, many of them will it away after their death in favor of public institutions. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. First printed in 1894 in Germany, since it was banned in his native Russia, it is the culmination of thirty years of Tolstoy's Christian anarchist beliefs. Q. A Christian cannot help but preach this at all times, on all the days of his life. The essence of this condition is this, that the men under the influence of the one idea suggested to them are not able to reflect upon their acts, and so do, without any reflection, what is prescribed to them in correspondence with the suggested idea, and what they are led up to through example, advice, or hints. Thieves, plunderers, murderers, cheats, who commit acts that are recognized as evil by themselves and by all men, serve as an example of what ought not to be done, and deter men from evil. In placing his life in carnal things, a man does that work which is always in dependence on spatial and temporal causes, which are outside of him. Some people — the minority — immediately, at once, by a prophetic feeling divine the truth of the teaching, abandon themselves to it, and execute it. This book is an attempt at describing the history of Christianity in the form of a history of the heresies. But the time is coming, and will soon be here, when it shall be quite clear for all men that they are not any good and are only in the way of people, and the people whom they bother will say to them kindly and meekly, as that man in the long overcoat, “Please, do not bother us.” And all the messengers and senders will have to follow that good advice, that is, stop riding with arms akimbo among the people, bothering them, and get down from their hobbies, take off their attire, listen to what people have to say, and, joining them, take hold with them of the true human work. The whole pagan history of humanity consists of only those cases when the worse seized the power over the less bad, and, having seized it, maintained it by cruelties and cunning, and, proclaiming themselves as guardians of justice and defenders of the good against the bad, ruled over the good. The working masses, the great majority of people, suffering from the constant, all-absorbing, senseless, dawnless labor and sufferings, suffer most of all from the consciousness of the crying contradiction between what exists and what ought to be, as the result of everything which is professed by them and by those who have placed them in this position and maintain them in it. How can we, who are standing on the threshold of a war of inner revolutions, which is terrifying by its wretchedness and destructiveness, and in comparison with which, as those who are preparing it say, the terrors of the year ’93 will be play, speak of a danger which is threatened us by the Dahomeans, the Zulus, etc., who live far, far away, and do not think of attacking us, and by those few thousands of robbers, thieves, and murderers, whom we ourselves have stupefied and corrupted, and whose number is not at all diminishing as the result of all our courts, prisons, and capital punishments? Christianity recognizes the love of self, and of the family, and of the nation, and of humanity — not only of humanity, but of everything living, of everything in existence; it recognizes the necessity for an endless widening of the sphere of love; but the object of this love it does not find outside of self, or in the aggregate of personalities — in the family, the race, the state, humanity, in the whole external world, but in oneself, in one’s personality — which, however, is a divine personality, the essence of which is the same love, to the necessity of widening which the animal personality was brought, in saving itself from the consciousness of its perdition. But this is what all the governments say of one another, and at the same time we know that all the European nations profess the same principles of freedom and of brotherhood, and so are in no need of defending themselves against one another. But a year, two, three years passed, and the book did not appear. Indeed, the meaning of the social concept of life consists in this, that a man, recognizing the cruelty of the struggle of individuals among themselves and the perishableness of the individual himself, transfers the meaning of his life to the aggregate of individuals; but in the universal military service it turns out that men, having brought all the sacrifices demanded of them, in order to free themselves from the cruelty of the struggle and the insecurity of life, are, after all the sacrifices which they have made, again called to bear all those dangers from which they thought they had freed themselves, and, besides, that aggregate, the state, in the name of which the individuals renounced their advantages, is again subjected to the same danger of destruction to which the individual himself was subjected before. Not my will be done, but Thine; not what I want, but what Thou wantest, and not as I want, but as Thou wantest. In this liberation and increase of the force does man’s true life, according to Christ’s teaching, consist. It is the culmination of thirty years of Tolstoy's Christian thinking, and lays out a new organization for society based on a literal Christian interpretation of the Bible. But the positivists and all the preachers of a scientific brotherhood, who do not take into consideration the weakening of the sentiment in proportion as the subject is widened, continue the discussion theoretically along the same direction: “If,” they say, “it was more advantageous for the personality to transfer its consciousness to the tribe, the family, and then to the nation, the state, it will be still more advantageous to transfer the consciousness to the whole aggregate of humanity, and for all to live for humanity, just as individuals live for the family, the state.”. It consists in asserting that, although Christ really taught to offer one’s cheek and give up a shirt, and this is a very high moral demand, there are malefactors in the world, and if these are not curbed by the exercise of force, the whole world and all good men will perish. Ivan IV. The Kingdom of God is within you by Leo Tolstoy Its easy to link to paragraphs in the Full Text Archive If this page contains some material that you want to link to but you don't want your visitors to have to scroll down the whole page just hover your mouse over the relevent paragraph and click the bookmark icon that appears to the left of it. And so, to solve the question, the very putting of which shows the failure to comprehend the teaching, the strange words, “It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us,” which were in an external manner to confirm the justice of certain establishments, and which have caused so much evil, were, as described in the Book of Acts, for the first time pronounced at this meeting, that is, it was asserted that the justice of what they decreed was testified to by the miraculous participation of the Holy Ghost, that is, of God, in this solution. They cannot rise all at once, because one hangs down from the other, keeping it from separating itself from the swarm, and so all continue to hang. The church teachers recognize the Sermon on the Mount with the commandment about non-resistance to evil as a divine revelation, and so, if they have found it necessary to write about my book at all, they ought, it would seem, first of all to answer this chief point of accusation and say outright whether they consider the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount and of the commandment about non-resistance to evil obligatory for a Christian, or not — and they must not answer it as this is generally done, that is, by saying that, although on the one hand it cannot properly be denied, on the other it cannot be affirmed, the more so that, and so forth — but must answer it just as the question is put by me in my book: did Christ actually demand from His disciples the fulfilment of what He taught in the Sermon on the Mount? 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