Reconnaissons donc que s’il existe une religion et une doctrine qui s’appelle le christianisme elle peut avoir ses hérésies. It is this that men do when they want to move men by means of external violence. No; for what he is doing through others, he is in reality doing in his own person. This is the same as tying up a growing chick and pushing it back into the shell from which it has come. All the church preachers know cases when this commandment may be broken. The lady of the world has not even made the reflection that, if there are no capitalists, and no armies to defend them, her husband will have no money, and she will have no salon and no costumes; and the artist has not made the reflection as to this, that he needs the capitalists, who are protected by the armies, to buy his pictures; but the instinct, which in this case takes the place of reason, guides them unerringly. He somehow manages in his hurry to pull the shirt over him, after missing the sleeves, somehow puts on his trousers, and leg-rags, draws on his boots, looks for his shawl and cap, grasps his fur coat, and is led into the hall, where he is placed behind a bench. It is most startling that society does not rise in a body and revolt at the very mention of the word “war.”. Caprivi accidentally gave utterance to what everybody knows, or feels, if he does not know, namely, that the existing structure of life is such as it is, not because it naturally must be such, because the nation wants it to be such, but because it is maintained as such by the violence of the governments, by the army with its bribed underofficers, officers, and generals. His ideas of nonviolent resistance which he shared in his works The Kingdom of God is Within You, had a profund impact on figures such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. On September 23, 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs. The monk kept pushing the description of relics, holidays, miraculous icons, psalters, etc., into his hands. A. One is pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility, and death; the other is meekness, repentance, humility, motion, and life. Christianity is penetrating into the consciousness of men, not only despite the violence exerted by the power, but even by means of it. Only with the present order can he, as a governor, prosecutor, senator, member of various councils, receive his salary of several thousands, without which he would at once perish with all his family, because, except by the position which he holds, he would not be able, with his ability, industry, and knowledge, to earn one hundredth part of what he is getting. The meaning is this, that men’s honor demands that people should fight, and the advantages of the nations demand that they should ruin and destroy one another, and that the attempts at stopping war are only worthy of smiles. The king does the same. The social life-conception entered into the consciousness of men through centuries and millenniums, passed through several forms, and has now passed for humanity into the sphere of the subconscious, which is transmitted through heredity, education, and habit, and so it seems natural to us. And in order to maintain so many soldiers and to make such vast preparations for murder, they spend yearly hundreds of millions, that is, what would be sufficient for the education of the people, for the execution of the greatest works of public utility, and would furnish the means for solving pacifically the social question. We execute a criminal, thus freeing society from him, and we are positively unable to tell whether the criminal would not have changed on the morrow and whether our execution is not a useless cruelty. According to this doctrine, all the changes in human life take place under the same laws under which they take place in the life of the animals. Neither society, nor the state, nor any men have ever asked you to maintain this order, by holding the place of landowner, merchant, emperor, priest, soldier, which you now hold; and you know full well that you took up your position, not at all with the self-sacrificing purpose of maintaining an order of life which is indispensable for the good of men, but for your own sake — for the sake of your greed, love of glory, ambition, indolence, cowardice. No matter how strange and contradictory this may seem, all the men of our time despise the very order of things which they help to maintain. In one way or another, all men of our time in their consciousness not only reject the present obsolete pagan order of life, but recognize, frequently not knowing it themselves and regarding themselves as enemies of Christianity, that our salvation lies only in the application of the Christian teaching, or of a part of it, in its true meaning, to life. It is true that nowhere in Europe is there such a despotic government and one to such a degree in accord with the ruling church, and so the participation of the power in the corruption of the masses in Russia is very strong; but it is not true that the Russian Church in its influence upon the masses in any way differs from any other church. Leo TOLSTOY (1828 - 1910), translated by Constance GARNETT (1861 - 1946) The title of the book comes from Luke 17:21. 32). The first edition of the novel was published in 1893, and was written by Leo Tolstoy. All history teaches us that blood is needed to speed and confirm the union of the nations. Why did they kill her boy, her fine boy, her only hope, her pride, her life? 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. vi. “The sciences, arts, civilizations, and cultures will disappear!”. The motion toward perfection of the publican, of Zacchæus, of the harlot, of the robber on the cross, is, according to this teaching, a greater good than the immovable righteousness of the Pharisee. Then it is impressed on the parents, and even demanded of them under threat of punishment in case of non-fulfilment, that the child shall be baptized, that is, dipped three times in water by the priest, in connection with which incomprehensible words are pronounced and even less comprehensible acts performed — the smearing of various parts of the body with oil, the shearing of the hair, and the blowing and spitting of the sponsors on the imaginary devil. or that, being an emperor or a president, you should be compelled to command troops, that is, to be the leader and guide of murderers? Besides, the greater half of these men know how to read, books, and not all books are those in which the business of war is lauded — there are also those in which its immorality is pointed out. Nor could they have acted otherwise: they are bound by the contradiction in which they live — the faith in the divinity of the teacher and the unbelief in His clearest words — from which they must in some way extricate themselves, and so it was not possible to expect from them any free opinion concerning the essence of the question, concerning that change in the lives of men which results from the application of Christ’s teaching to the existing order. 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....”. He throws off his fur coat, pulls off his boots with his feet, takes off his vest, draws his shirt over his head, and with protruding ribs, naked, with shivering body, and emitting an odor of liquor, tobacco, and perspiration, with bare feet, enters into the Office, without knowing what to do with his bared muscular arms. But what is to be done with men who preach neither revolution, nor any special religious dogmas, but only, because they do not wish to harm any one, refuse to take the oath of allegiance, to pay taxes, to take part in court proceedings, in military service, and in duties on which the whole structure of the government is based? It looks as though it seemed to them that there was not even any choice, and that there was but the one path of slavish obedience. In this closer union lies the meaning of the whole of life — and tomorrow some maddened head of a government will say something foolish, another man like him will answer him, and I shall go, making myself liable to be killed, to kill men who not only have done me no harm, but whom I love. If the consciousness had been stronger still and the amount of interactions even greater, it is very likely that the minister would not have made up his mind to prescribe, and the emperor to confirm such a decree. The book was first published in Germany in 1894 after being banned in his home country of Russia. Can a Christian, still remaining a Christian, take part in the government, using violence against his neighbors, or not? We think, then, that it is the business of every man, who believes that war is inconsistent with our religion, respectfully, but steadfastly, to refuse to engage in it. Manufacturers build hospitals, schools, houses for their workmen, and establish savings-banks and pensions; some establish companies, in which they take an equal share with other shareholders. I find no difficulty in keeping covenant both with Christ and the Constitution.... Jesus Christ forbids me to resist evil-doers by taking “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blood for blood, and life for life.” My government requires the very reverse, and depends, for its own self-preservation, on the halter, the musket, and the sword, seasonably employed against its domestic and foreign enemies. A perplexed Tolstoy, searching for an explanation, cites five arguments opposing nonviolence and universal love: some people say Christ sanctioned violence; others believe that wicked people make it necessary to use force; resistance to evil by force is justified when one is protecting a neighbor; one who uses force can still be a Christian; and, finally, many believe that Christians must serve prevailing earthly powers. But men who see how one article in a newspaper changes the state of affairs more than dozens of meetings of monarchs and sessions of parliaments, see more and more clearly that it is not the meetings and rendezvous and the discussions in the parliaments that guide the affairs of men, but something independent of all this, which is not centred anywhere. Such has been the condition of all the violated, but before this they did not know it, and in the majority of cases they believed naively that governments existed for their good; that without government they would perish; that the thought that men could live without governments was a blasphemy which ought not even be uttered; that this was for some reason a terrible doctrine of anarchism, with which is connected the conception of everything terrible. The culmination of a lifetime's thought, it espouses a commitment to Jesus's message of turning the other cheek. Yes, but! Eighteen hundred years ago Christ answered this question by saying that the end of the present world, that is, of the pagan structure of the world, would come when the calamities of men should be increased to their farthest limit and at the same time the gospel of the kingdom of God, that is, the possibility of a new, violenceless structure of the world, should be preached in all the world (Matt. The Congress feels that it can affirm that the whole of Europe desires Peace, and is impatiently waiting for the moment when it shall see the end of those crushing armaments which, under the plea of defence, become in their turn a danger, by keeping alive mutual distrust, and are, at the same time the cause of that economic disturbance which stands in the way of settling in a satisfactory manner the problems of labor and poverty, which should take precedence of all others. But the fate of Garrison and especially of Ballou, who is not known to any one, in spite of his fifty years of stubborn and constant work in one and the same direction, has also confirmed to me the other fact, that there exists some kind of unexpressed but firm understanding as to passing all such attempts in silence. The men of war are the scourges of the world. Thus they flogged the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth man — each man receiving seventy blows. In Switzerland, I know men were incarcerated in the Chillon Fortress in the year 1890 for refusing to do military service, and they did not change their determination in consequence of their imprisonment. Therefore men always are in a threefold relation to truth: one set of truths has been so acquired by them that these truths have become unconscious causes of their actions, others have only begun to be revealed to them, and the third, though not yet made their own, are revealed to them with such a degree of lucidity that inevitably, in one way or another, they must take up some stand in relation to them, must recognize them, or not. It is the culmination of thirty years of Tolstoy's Christian anarchist thinking, and lays out a new organisation for society based on a literal Christian interpretation. Meanwhile the crowd of fathers, mothers, wives, pushed by the policemen, press close to the gate, to find out who is accepted, and who not. 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