--- title: The Kingdom of God Is Within You --- # The Kingdom of God Is Within You A book-length treatise written between 1890 and 1893. Its full title is *The Kingdom of God Is Within You, or Christianity Not as a Mystical Teaching but as a New Understanding of Life* («Царство божие внутри вас, или Христианство не как мистическое учение, а как новое жизнепонимание»). It could not be printed in Russia and first appeared abroad. Source text: PSS Tom 28, pp. 1–293. - [English, 1894 (Garnett) · read-along](the-kingdom-of-god-is-within-you.en-garnett.html) - [Русский](the-kingdom-of-god-is-within-you.ru.html) (Russian version) - [English (machine translation)](the-kingdom-of-god-is-within-you.en-machine.html) - [Alignment notes](alignment-notes.html) - [The corpus dive](/research/works/non-fiction/treatises/1890-1893-the-kingdom-of-god-is-within-you/index.html) **This edition is being built in stages.** It now holds the preface and chapters I–VIII. Chapters IX–XII will follow. ## What the first chapters say The book takes up where *What Is My Faith?* («В чем моя вера?», 1884) left off: the commandment “resist not him that is evil” (Matthew 5:39; «не противься злому»), which, the preface says, the church teaching does not recognise — “the non-recognition of the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence” («непризнание заповеди непротивления злу насилием»). Chapter I gathers the people who held to that commandment and were passed over: the Quakers, William Lloyd Garrison's Declaration of 1838, Adin Ballou's catechism of non-resistance, the fifteenth-century Czech Petr Chelčický's *The Net of Faith* («Сеть веры»), Dymond and Musser on refusing military service, and five Tambov peasants who refused it in 1818. Chapter II goes through the answers the book received, from churchmen and from freethinkers, and finds in both the same evasion. Chapter III asks why the plain meaning of the teaching is no longer understood, and answers with the churches: “the churches, as churches, always have been and cannot help being institutions not only alien but directly hostile to Christ's teaching” («церкви, как церкви, всегда были и не могут не быть учреждениями не только чуждыми, но прямо враждебными учению Христа»). ## The English The reading text is Constance Garnett's translation, published in 1894. Her wording is unchanged; footnotes marked *Our note* show where it departs from the Russian — for instance where Tolstoy writes “the churches” («церкви») and she has “the Church”. Her own translator's preface is not included. The machine translation is a literal first pass from the Russian, kept for comparison.