The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Preface

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John VIII, 32).

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna (Matt. X, 28).

You were bought with a price; do not become the slaves of men (I Corinthians, VII, 23).

In 1884 I wrote a book under the title “What Is My Faith?”. In this book I truly set out what I believe.

In setting out my faith in Christ’s teaching, I could not help saying also why I do not believe in, and consider an error, that church faith which is usually called Christianity.

Among the many departures of this teaching from Christ’s teaching I pointed to the chief departure, namely the non-recognition of the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence, which shows more plainly than the other departures the distortion of Christ’s teaching by the church teaching.

I knew very little, like all of us, about what had been done and preached and written in former times on the question of non-resistance to evil. I knew what had been said on this subject by the fathers of the church — Origen, Tertullian and others — and I knew too that there had existed and still exist certain so-called sects of Mennonites, Herrnhuters, Quakers, who do not permit a Christian the use of weapons and do not go into military service; but what had been done by these so-called sects to clarify this question was little known to me.

My book, as I had expected, was held back by the Russian censorship, but partly owing to my reputation as a writer, partly because it interested people, this book spread in manuscripts and lithographs in Russia and in translations abroad, and called forth, on the one side, from people who shared my thoughts, a series of reports about works written on this same subject, and on the other side, a series of criticisms of the thoughts expressed in the book itself.

Both the one and the other, together with the historical events of recent times, made a great deal clear to me and brought me to new inferences and conclusions, which I now want to express.

First I will speak of the information I received about the history of the question of non-resistance to evil; then of the judgments on this question which were expressed by critics both spiritual, that is, professing the Christian religion, and secular, that is, not professing the Christian religion; and, finally, of the conclusions to which I was brought both by the one and the other and by the historical events of recent times.

I

THE TEACHING OF NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL BY VIOLENCE HAS BEEN PROFESSED FROM THE VERY FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIANITY, AND IS PROFESSED NOW, BY A MINORITY OF PEOPLE

On the book “What Is My Faith?”. Information called forth by this book. Letters from Quakers. Garrison’s Declaration. Adin Ballou, his works and catechism. Chelčický’s “Net of Faith”. The attitude of people to works that clarify Christ’s teaching. Dymond’s book “On War”. Musser’s book “Non-resistance Asserted”. The government’s treatment of people who refused military service in 1818. The generally hostile attitude of governments and of liberal people toward people who refuse to take part in the violence of the state, and their deliberate effort to pass over in silence and hide these manifestations of Christian non-resistance.

Among the first responses to my book were letters from American Quakers. In these letters, expressing their sympathy with my views on the unlawfulness for a Christian of all violence and war, the Quakers told me details about their so-called sect, which for more than 200 years has professed in deed Christ’s teaching of non-resistance to evil by violence, and has not used and does not now use weapons to defend itself. Along with the letters the Quakers sent me their pamphlets, journals and books. From these journals, pamphlets and books they sent me I learned to what a degree, already many years ago, they had irrefutably proved the obligation for a Christian of fulfilling the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence, and had exposed the wrongness of the church teaching that permits executions and wars.

Having proved by a whole series of arguments and texts that war, that is, the maiming and killing of people, is incompatible with a religion founded on peaceableness and good will toward people, the Quakers assert and prove that nothing has so much helped to darken Christ’s truth in the eyes of the heathen and hindered the spread of Christianity in the world as the non-recognition of this commandment by people who called themselves Christians — as the permission of war and violence for Christians.

Acquaintance with the activity of the Quakers and their writings — with Fox, Penn and especially with the book of Dymond of 1827 — showed me not only that the impossibility of joining Christianity with violence and war had been recognised long, long ago, but that this incompatibility had long ago been proved so clearly and indubitably that one can only wonder how this impossible joining of Christian teaching with violence, which has been preached and continues to be preached by the churches, can go on.

Besides the information I received from the Quakers, at about this same time I received, also from America, information on the same subject from a completely different source, previously quite unknown to me.

The son of William Lloyd Garrison, the famous fighter for the freedom of the negroes, wrote to me that, having read my book, in which he found thoughts similar to those that had been expressed by his father in 1838, and supposing that it would interest me to learn this, he was sending me the declaration or proclamation of non-resistance — “Non-resistance” — drawn up by his father almost 50 years before.

This proclamation arose under the following circumstances: William Lloyd Garrison, discussing measures for ending war in a society for establishing peace among people that existed in America in 1838, came to the conclusion that the establishment of universal peace can be founded only on the open recognition of the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence (Matt. V, 39) in its full meaning, as it is understood by the Quakers, with whom Garrison was on friendly terms. Having come to this conclusion, Garrison then drew up and proposed to the society the following proclamation, which was signed at that time, in 1838, by many members.

Following this proclamation Garrison founded a society of non-resistance and a journal called “The Non-Resistant” (“Non-resistant”), in which the teaching of non-resistance was preached in its full meaning and with all its consequences, as it had been expressed in the proclamation. Information about the later fate of the society and the journal of non-resistance I obtained from the excellent biography of W. L. Garrison compiled by his sons.

The society and the journal did not last long: the majority of Garrison’s fellow workers in the cause of freeing the slaves, fearing that the too radical demands expressed in the journal “The Non-Resistant” might push people away from the practical work of freeing the negroes — the majority of his fellow workers gave up professing the principle of non-resistance as it had been expressed in the proclamation, and the society and the journal ceased to exist.

This proclamation of Garrison’s, expressing so powerfully and eloquently such an important confession of faith for people, ought, it would seem, to have struck people and become known throughout the world and the subject of discussion from every side. But nothing of the kind happened. Not only is it unknown in Europe, but even among Americans, who honour Garrison’s memory so highly, this proclamation is almost unknown.

The same obscurity has befallen another fighter for non-resistance to evil, who died recently and for 50 years preached this teaching, the American Adin Ballou. How little known everything is that relates to the question of non-resistance can be seen from the fact that Garrison the son, who wrote an excellent biography of his father in 4 large volumes, this Garrison the son, to my question whether a society of non-resistance now exists and whether it has followers, answered me that, as far as he knew, this society had broken up and there were no followers of this teaching, while at the time he was writing to me there was living in Massachusetts, in Hopedale, Adin Ballou, who had taken part in the labours of Garrison the father and had devoted 50 years of his life to preaching the teaching of non-resistance by word of mouth and in print. Later I received a letter from Wilson, a pupil and assistant of Ballou’s, and entered into correspondence with Ballou himself. I wrote to Ballou, and he answered me and sent me his works. Here are some extracts from them.

“Jesus Christ is my lord and teacher,” says Ballou in one of his articles exposing the inconsistency of Christians who recognise the right of defence and of war. “I have promised, leaving everything, to follow him, through bad and good, unto death itself. But I am a citizen of the democratic republic of the United States, to which I have sworn allegiance, that I will uphold the constitution of my country, if need be with the sacrifice of my life. Christ demands of me that I do to others what I would want them to do to me. The Constitution of the United States demands of me that I do to two million slaves (there were slaves then; now one may boldly put workers in their place) exactly the reverse of what I would want done to me, that is, that I help to keep them in the slavery in which they are. And that is nothing; I go on electing or being elected, I help to govern, I am even ready to be chosen for some office of government. This does not prevent me from being a Christian. I go on professing, and find no difficulty in keeping my covenant both with Christ and with the government.

“Jesus Christ forbids me to resist those who do evil and to take from them an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood, life for life.

“My government demands of me exactly the opposite and bases its own defence on the gallows, the gun and the sword, used against its domestic and foreign enemies. And accordingly the country is supplied with gallows, prisons, arsenals, warships and soldiers.

“In the maintenance and use of these costly murderous contrivances we can very conveniently practise the virtue of forgiving those who injure us, of loving our enemies, of blessing those who curse us and doing good to those who hate us. For this purpose we have permanent Christian priests to pray for us and call down God’s blessing on holy murders. I see all this (that is, the contradiction between profession and life) and I go on both professing and governing, and I am proud that I am at one and the same time a devout Christian and a devoted servant of the government. I do not want to agree with this insane notion of non-resistance. I cannot give up my influence and leave only immoral people at the head of the government. The Constitution says: the government has the right to declare war, and I agree, I support this, I swear that I will support it. I do not cease to be a Christian on that account. War too is a Christian duty. Is it not a Christian deed to kill hundreds of thousands of one’s neighbours, to violate women, to ruin and burn cities and to commit every possible cruelty? It is time to throw aside all these invented sentimentalities. This is the truest means of forgiving injuries and loving enemies. If only we do it in the spirit of love, nothing can be more Christian than such wholesale murder.”

In another pamphlet, under the title “How Many People Are Needed to Transform Villainy into Righteousness”, he says: “One man must not kill. If he has killed, he is a criminal, he is a murderer. Two, ten, a hundred men, if they do this — they are murderers. But a state or a people may kill as many as it wants, and that will not be murder, but a good, kind deed. Only gather more people together, and the slaughter of tens of thousands of people becomes an innocent deed. But exactly how many people are needed for this?

That is the question. One cannot steal and rob, but a whole people can. But exactly how many are needed for this? Why must 1, 10, 100 men not break the law of God, but a great many may?”

Here is Ballou’s catechism, composed for his flock.

For 50 years Ballou wrote and published books chiefly on the question of non-resistance to evil by violence. In these works, excellent in clarity of thought and beauty of exposition, the question is examined from every possible side. The binding force of this commandment is established for every Christian who professes the Bible as divine revelation. All the usual objections to the commandment of non-resistance, from the Old Testament as well as from the New, such as the driving out from the temple and so on, are cited, and refutations are set against all of them; the practical reasonableness of this rule is shown independently of scripture, and all the objections usually made against it are set out and refuted. Thus one chapter of his work treats of non-resistance to evil in exceptional cases; in it he grants that if there were cases in which the application of non-resistance to evil were impossible, this would prove that the rule is unsound in general. Citing these exceptional cases, he proves that it is precisely in them that the application of this rule is needed and reasonable. There is no side of the question, either for its supporters or for its opponents, that has not been examined in these works. I say all this in order to show the undoubted interest that such works ought to have for people who profess Christianity, and that therefore, it would seem, Ballou’s activity ought to have been known, and the thoughts he expressed ought to have been either accepted or refuted; but nothing of the kind happened.

The activity of Garrison the father, with his founding of the society of non-resistants and the declaration, convinced me even more than my correspondence with the Quakers that the departure of state Christianity from Christ’s law of non-resistance by violence is a thing long noticed and pointed out, and that people have worked and do not cease to work to expose it. Ballou’s activity confirmed this for me still more. But the fate of Garrison, and especially of Ballou, known to no one in spite of 50 years of stubborn and constant work in one and the same direction, confirmed for me also that there exists some unspoken but firm agreement to pass over in silence all such attempts.

In August 1890 Ballou died, and in an American journal of Christian tendency (Religio-Philosophical journal, August 23) there was an obituary of him.

In this laudatory obituary it is written that Ballou was the spiritual leader of a community, that he delivered from 8 to 9 thousand sermons, married 1000 couples and wrote about 500 articles, but not one word is said about the aim to which he devoted his life; not even the word “non-resistance” is said.

Just as everything the Quakers have preached for 200 years, just as the activity of Garrison the father, the founding of his society and journal, his proclamation, so too all of Ballou’s activity exactly as if they do not exist and never existed.

A striking example of such obscurity of works aimed at clarifying non-resistance to evil by violence and exposing those who do not recognise this commandment is the fate of the book of the Czech Chelčický, which only recently became known and has still not been printed.

Soon after my book came out in German I received a letter from Prague from a professor of the university there, informing me of the existence of a work, never printed anywhere, by the fifteenth-century Czech Chelčický, called “The Net of Faith”. In this work, as the professor wrote to me, Chelčický about 4 centuries ago expressed the same view of true and false Christianity that I had expressed in the work “What Is My Faith?”. The professor wrote to me that Chelčický’s work was to be published for the first time, in Czech, in the journal of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Not being able to obtain the work itself, I tried to acquaint myself with what is known about Chelčický, and such information I received from a German book sent to me by the same Prague professor, and from Pypin’s history of Czech literature. Here is what is said in Pypin:

“The Net of Faith” is Christ’s teaching, which is to draw man out of the dark depths of the sea of life and its untruths. True faith consists in believing God’s words; but now such a time has come that people take the true faith for heresy, and therefore reason must point out what the true faith consists in, if anyone does not know it. Darkness has hidden it from people, and they do not know the true law of Christ.

“To explain this law Chelčický points to the primitive organisation of Christian society — that organisation which, he says, is now considered in the Roman church a vile heresy.

“This primitive church was his own ideal of social organisation, based on equality, freedom and brotherhood. Christianity, in Chelčický’s opinion, still keeps these foundations within it; it is only necessary that society return to its pure teaching, and then every other order, which needs kings and popes, would turn out to be superfluous: in everything the one law of love is sufficient...

“Historically Chelčický attributes the decline of Christianity to the times of Constantine the Great, whom Pope Sylvester brought into Christianity with all his heathen customs and life. Constantine in his turn endowed the pope with worldly wealth and power. From that time on both powers constantly helped each other and strove only for outward glory. Doctors and masters and the clerical estate began to care only about subjecting the whole world to their dominion, armed people against one another for murders and robberies, and completely destroyed Christianity in faith and in life. Chelčický entirely rejects the right of war and the death penalty: every warrior, even a ‘knight’, is only a doer of violence, a villain and a murderer.”

The same, with some biographical details and extracts from Chelčický’s correspondence, is said in the German book too.

Having thus learned the essence of Chelčický’s teaching, I awaited with all the more impatience the appearance of “The Net of Faith” in the journal of the Academy. But a year passed, two, three — the book did not appear. Only in 1888 did I learn that the printing of the book, once begun, had been stopped. I obtained the proof sheets of what had been printed and read the book. The book is in every respect astonishing.

Its content is quite correctly conveyed by Pypin. Chelčický’s fundamental thought is that Christianity, having united with power under Constantine and continuing to develop in these conditions, became completely distorted and ceased to be Christianity. Chelčický gave his work the title “The Net of Faith” because, having taken as an epigraph the verse of the Gospel about the calling of the disciples so that they should become fishers of men, Chelčický, continuing this comparison, says: “Christ through his disciples caught the whole world in his net of faith, but the big fish, breaking through the net, leapt out of it, and through the holes made by these big fish all the rest went away too, so that the net was left almost empty.”

The big fish that broke through the net are the rulers, emperors, popes, kings, who, not renouncing power, accepted not Christianity but only its mask.

Chelčický teaches the same thing that the non-resisting Mennonites and Quakers taught and teach now, and in former times the Bogomils, the Paulicians and many others. He teaches that Christianity, which demands of its followers meekness, humility, gentleness, forgiveness of injuries, turning the other cheek when struck on one, love of enemies, is incompatible with violence, which is the necessary condition of power.

A Christian, as Chelčický interprets it, not only cannot be a commander or a soldier, but cannot take any part in government, cannot be a merchant or even a landowner, but can only be either a craftsman or a tiller of the soil.

This book is one of the rare books exposing official Christianity that have survived the bonfires. All such books, called heretical, were burned together with their authors, so that there are very few ancient works exposing the departure of official Christianity, and therefore this book is especially interesting.

But besides being interesting however one looks at it, this book is one of the most remarkable works of thought, both in depth of content and in the astonishing power and beauty of its popular language, and in its antiquity. And yet this book has remained unprinted now for more than four centuries and continues to be unknown, except to learned specialists.

It would seem that all works of this kind, by the Quakers, and Garrison, and Ballou, and Chelčický, which assert and prove on the basis of the Gospel that our world understands Christ’s teaching falsely, ought to arouse interest, agitation, noise, disputes among both the shepherds and the flock.

Works of this kind, touching the very essence of Christian teaching, ought, it would seem, to have been examined and either recognised as just or rejected and refuted.

But nothing of the kind happens. With all these works one and the same thing is repeated. People of the most diverse views, believers as well as — what is worth wondering at — unbelieving liberals, as if by agreement, all keep equally stubborn silence about them, and everything that people do to clarify the true meaning of Christ’s teaching remains unknown or forgotten.

But still more astonishing is the obscurity of two works which I also learned of on the occasion of the appearance of my book. These are Dymond’s book “On war”, published for the first time in London in 1824, and Daniel Musser’s “On Non-resistance”, written in 1864. The obscurity of these books is astonishing especially because, not to speak of their merit, both books deal not so much with theory as with the practical application of theory to life, with the relation of Christianity to military service, which is now especially important and interesting under universal military conscription.

It will be asked, perhaps: how then is a subject bound to act who believes that war is incompatible with his religion, but from whom the government demands participation in military service?

It seems that this is a most living question, and one to which the answer is especially important under the present universal military conscription. All, or the vast majority of people, are Christians, and all men are called up for military service. How then must a man, as a Christian, answer this demand? Dymond’s answer is this:

“His duty consists in refusing service with meekness, but also with firmness.

“There are some people who, without any definite reasoning, for some reason conclude straight off that the responsibility for state measures falls only on those who give the orders, or that governments and kings decide questions of what is good or bad for their subjects, and that the subjects are bound only to obey. I think that reasoning of this kind only clouds people’s conscience. ‘I cannot take part in the council of government and therefore am not answerable for its crimes.’ True, we are not answerable for the crimes of rulers, but we are answerable for our own crimes. And the crimes of rulers become ours if we, knowing that they are crimes, help to commit them... Those who suppose that they are bound to obey the government and that the responsibility for the crimes they commit is transferred from them to their sovereigns deceive themselves.

“They say: ‘we hand over our actions to the will of other people, and our actions can be neither bad nor good; in our actions there can be neither merit for good nor responsibility for evil, since they are not done by our will.’”

It is remarkable that this very thing is expressed in the instruction to soldiers which they are made to learn by heart: it says there that only the commander answers for the consequences of his order.

But this is not just. A man cannot take off himself the responsibility for his actions. And this can be seen from the following: “If a commander orders you to kill your neighbour’s child, to kill your father, your mother, will you obey? But if you do not obey, then the whole argument is good for nothing, because if you can disobey rulers in one case, then where will you find the limit up to which you may obey? There is no other limit than the one defined by Christianity, and this limit is both reasonable and practicable.

“And therefore we hold that the duty of every man who considers war incompatible with Christianity is meekly but firmly to refuse military service. And let those who have to act in this way, let them remember that a great duty lies upon them. On their faithfulness to their religion depends — in so far as it depends on people — the fate of peace among mankind. Let them profess their conviction and defend it. And not with words alone, but with sufferings too, if it is needed. If you believe that Christ forbade killing, do not believe either the reasonings or the orders of people who call you to take part in it. By such a firm refusal to take part in violence you will draw to yourselves the blessing given to those who hear these words and do them, and a time will come when the world too will honour you as sharers in the regeneration of mankind.”

Musser’s book is called “Non-resistance Asserted” or “The Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of This World Separated”, in 1864. “Non-resistance asserted” or “Kingdom of Christ and kingdom of this world separated”.

This book is devoted to the same question and clarifies it on the occasion of the American government’s demand of military service from its citizens during the civil war. And it too has a most present-day significance, clarifying the question of how, under what conditions, people must and can refuse military service. In the introduction the author says:

“It is known that in the United States there are many people who consciously reject war. They are called ‘non-resisting’ (non-resistant) or ‘defenceless’ (defenceless) Christians. These Christians refuse to defend their country, to bear arms and, at the demand of the government, to fight against its enemies. Until now this religious reason was respected by the government, and those who put it forward were released from service. But with the beginning of our civil war public opinion has been roused against this circumstance. It is natural that persons who consider it their duty to bear all the burdens and dangers of military life for the defence of their fatherland should feel ill will toward those persons who, together with them, for a long time enjoyed the protection and advantages of the government, but in the time of need and danger do not want to take part in bearing the labours and danger for its defence. It is natural even that the position of such people should be judged unreasonable, monstrous, and should be judged suspicious.”

“Many orators and writers,” says the author, “rose up against such a position and tried to prove the wrongness of non-resistance both by common sense and by scripture; and this is entirely natural, and in many cases these writers are right — right with regard to persons who, refusing the labours of military service, do not refuse the advantages they receive from governments, but — not right with regard to the principle of ‘non-resistance’ itself.” First of all the author proves that the rule of non-resistance is binding on a Christian by the fact that this precept is clear and that it was given by Christ to every Christian without possibility of reinterpretation.

“Judge for yourselves whether it is right to obey man rather than God,” said Peter and John. And in just the same way every man who wishes to be a Christian must regard demands to go to war, when Christ has said to him: “Resist not evil by violence.”

With this the author considers the question of the principle itself settled. But the other question, whether persons who do not refuse the advantages given by the government’s violence have the right to refuse military service, the author examines in detail and comes to the conclusion that a Christian who follows the law of Christ, if he does not go to war, likewise cannot take part in any government arrangements: neither in courts nor in elections — and likewise cannot in his personal affairs resort to the authorities, the police or the courts. — Further on in the book the relation of the Old Testament to the New is examined, and the significance of government for non-Christians; objections to the teaching of non-resistance are presented, with their refutations. The author concludes his book with the following:

“Christians do not need government and therefore cannot either obey it in what is contrary to Christ’s teaching or, still less, take part in it.”

“Christ chose his disciples out of the world,” he says. “They do not expect worldly goods and worldly happiness, but, on the contrary, they expect eternal life. The spirit in which they live makes them content and happy in every situation. If the world tolerates them, they are always content. But if the world will not leave them in peace, they will go away to another place, since they are wanderers on the earth and have no fixed place of residence. They consider that the dead can bury their dead; but they need one thing: ‘to follow their teacher.’”

Without touching on the question of whether the definition of a Christian’s duty with regard to war that is established in both books is right or wrong, one cannot fail to see the practical importance and urgency of deciding this question.

There are people — there are hundreds of thousands of Quakers, there are Mennonites, there are all our Dukhobors, Molokans, and people who belong to no definite sects, who consider that violence, and therefore military service, is incompatible with Christianity, and therefore every year here in Russia several of those called up refuse military service on the basis of their religious convictions. What then does the government do? Does it let them go? — No. — Does it make them go and, in case of refusal, punish them? — No. In 1818 the government acted in the following way. Here is an extract, known to almost no one in Russia, from the diary of Nik. Nik. Muravyov-Karsky, not passed by the censorship:

2nd October 1818. Tiflis.

In the morning the commandant told me that five serf peasants of Tambov province had recently been sent to Georgia. These men had been given up as soldiers but do not want to serve; they have already been flogged with the knout several times and driven through the ranks, but they willingly give themselves up to the cruellest torments and to death, so as not to serve. “Let us go,” they say, “and do not touch us, we will touch no one. All people are equal, and the sovereign is the same kind of man as we are; why should we pay him taxes, why should I put my life in danger to kill in war a man who has done me no harm? You can cut us in pieces, but we will not change our thoughts, we will not put on the greatcoat and will not eat the ration. Whoever takes pity on us will give us alms, but we have had nothing from the state and want to have nothing.” Such are the words of these muzhiks, who assure us that there are a great many like them in Russia. They were taken four times to the Committee of Ministers and finally it was decided to lay the matter before the sovereign, who ordered them to be sent to Georgia for correction and instructed the commander-in-chief to report to him monthly on the gradual success in bringing these peasants to proper thoughts.”

How this correction ended is unknown, as the whole episode, which was kept in deep secrecy, is unknown too.

So the government acted 75 years ago — so it acted in a great number of cases, always carefully hidden from the people. So it acts now too, with the exception of the German Mennonites living in Kherson province, whose refusal of military service is recognised as valid and who are made to serve out their terms of service in work in the forestry.

In those recent cases of refusal of military service on account of the religious convictions of non-Mennonites, government officials acted as follows:

First they apply all the measures of violence used in our time for the “correction” of those who refuse and for bringing them “to proper thoughts”, and they keep the handling of these cases in the greatest secrecy. I know that about one of those who refused in 1884 in Moscow, two months after his refusal, a huge, thick file had been put together, kept in the ministry under the greatest secrecy.

It usually begins with the one who refuses being sent to priests, and, to their shame, they always exhort those who refuse. — But since exhortation in the name of Christ to renounce Christ is for the most part unsuccessful, after the exhortation of the clergy the one who refused is sent to the gendarmes. The gendarmes usually, finding nothing political, send him back, and then the one who refused is sent to the learned, to doctors and to the madhouse. In all these transfers the one who refuses, deprived of freedom, endures every kind of humiliation and suffering, like a condemned criminal. (This was repeated in four cases.) From the madhouse the doctors release the one who refused, and then all kinds of secret, cunning measures begin, so as neither to let the one who refused go, thereby encouraging others to refuse just as he did, nor at the same time to leave him among the soldiers, so that the soldiers too should not learn from him that their being called to military service is not at all done according to the law of God, as they are assured, but against it.

The most convenient thing for the government would be to execute the one who refused: to flog him to death with sticks or in some other way, as used to be done. But to execute a man openly for being faithful to the teaching that we ourselves profess is impossible. And to leave alone a man who refuses obedience is also impossible. And so the government tries either to force this man by sufferings to renounce Christ, or somehow to get rid of him unnoticed, without executing him openly, and somehow to hide both this man’s act and the man himself from other people. And every kind of trick and cunning and torment of this man begins. Either they exile this man to the borderlands, or they provoke him to disobedience and then try him for breach of discipline and lock him up in prison, in a disciplinary battalion, where, hidden from everyone, they torment him freely, or they declare him mad and lock him up in a lunatic asylum. Thus one was exiled to Tashkent, that is, as if transferred to the Tashkent army, another to Omsk, a third was tried for disobedience and locked in prison, a fourth in a lunatic asylum.

Everywhere one and the same thing is repeated. Not only the government but also the majority of liberal, freethinking people, as if by agreement, carefully turn away from everything that has been said, written, done and is being done by people to expose the incompatibility of violence in its most terrible, coarse and glaring form — in the form of soldiering, that is, readiness to kill anyone whatever — with the teaching not only of Christianity but even of humaneness, which society supposedly professes.

So that the information I received about the degree to which the true meaning of Christ’s teaching has long been clarified and is being more and more clarified, and about how the higher, ruling classes, not only in Russia but in Europe and in America, regard this clarification and the fulfilment of the teaching, convinced me that there exists in these ruling classes a consciously hostile attitude to true Christianity, expressed chiefly in passing over in silence all its manifestations.

II

JUDGMENTS ON NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL BY VIOLENCE BY BELIEVERS AND UNBELIEVERS

The fate of the book “What Is My Faith?”. The evasiveness of the answers of religious critics to the questions raised in this book. 1st answer: violence does not contradict Christianity. 2nd answer: the necessity of violence to restrain evildoers. 3rd answer: the obligation of violence to defend one’s neighbour. 4th answer: treating breach of the commandment of non-resistance as simple weakness. 5th answer: evading an answer by pretending that the question was settled long ago. This lie, and sheltering behind the authority of the church, of antiquity and of holiness, is the only way out for religious people from the contradiction between violence and Christianity, both in theory and in life. The usual attitude of the clergy and the authorities to the profession of true Christianity. The general character of the Russian secular criticisms. Foreign secular criticisms. The wrongness of the judgments of both kinds of critics comes from not understanding the true meaning of Christ’s teaching.

The judgments on my book produced in me the same impression of a desire to hide, to pass over in silence what I had tried to express in it.

When it came out, the book, as I had expected, was banned, and by law was to have been burned. But instead of being burned the book was taken apart among officials and spread in a great number of copies and lithographed impressions, and in translations printed abroad.

And very soon criticisms of the book appeared, not only spiritual but secular, which the government not only permitted but encouraged. So that even the refutation of the book, which was considered unknown to anyone, was set as a theme for theological dissertations in the academies.

The criticisms of my book, both Russian and foreign, divide into two main kinds: religious criticisms — of people who consider themselves believers — and secular criticisms — freethinking ones.

I will begin with the first:

In my book I accuse the church teachers of teaching contrary to Christ’s commandments, clearly and definitely expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, and especially contrary to the commandment of non-resistance to evil, and of thereby depriving Christ’s teaching of all its meaning. The church teachers recognise the Sermon on the Mount, with the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence, as divine revelation, and therefore, once they had found it necessary to write about my book, it would seem they had above all to answer this chief point of the accusation and say straight out whether or not they recognise the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount and the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence as binding on a Christian, and to answer not in the way this is usually done, that is, to say that although, on the one hand, one cannot properly deny it, yet, on the other hand, again one cannot assert it, the more so since, and so on — but to answer in the same way as the question is put in my book: did Christ really demand of his disciples the fulfilment of what he taught in the Sermon on the Mount, and therefore can or cannot a Christian, remaining a Christian, go to court, taking part in it, condemning people or seeking protection in it by force; can or cannot a Christian, remaining a Christian, take part in government, using violence against his neighbours; and the most important question, facing everyone now with universal military conscription — can or cannot a Christian, remaining a Christian, contrary to Christ’s direct instruction, make promises about future actions directly contrary to the teaching, and, taking part in military service, prepare to kill people or commit such killings?

The questions are put clearly and directly, and it seemed one ought to answer them clearly and directly. But in all the criticisms of my book nothing of the kind was done, just as nothing was done with regard to all those exposures of the church teachers’ departure from Christ’s law with which history since the times of Constantine is full.

A very great deal was said on the occasion of my book about how wrongly I interpret this and that passage of the Gospel, about how I err in not recognising the Trinity, the redemption and the immortality of the soul; a very great deal was said, but only not the one thing that for every Christian makes up the chief, essential question of life: how to unite the teaching of forgiveness, humility, self-renunciation and love for all — for neighbours and for enemies — clearly expressed in the words of the teacher and in the heart of each of us, with the demand for military violence against people of one’s own or a foreign nation.

Everything that can be called semblances of answers to this question can be reduced to the following five categories. I tried to collect in this respect everything I could, not only from the criticisms of my book, but from everything that was written on this theme in former times as well.

The first and coarsest way of answering consists in the bold assertion that violence does not contradict Christ’s teaching, that it is permitted and even prescribed to Christians by the Old and New Testaments.

Assertions of this kind come for the most part from people standing on the high rungs of the government or spiritual hierarchy and in consequence quite sure that no one will dare to object to their assertions, and if anyone does object, they will not hear these objections. These people for the most part, owing to the intoxication of power, have lost to such a degree any idea of what that Christianity is in whose name they hold their position, that everything that is Christian in Christianity seems to them sectarianism; and everything in the scripture of both the Old and the New Testament that can be reinterpreted in an anti-Christian and heathen sense they consider the foundation of Christianity. In support of their assertion that Christianity does not contradict violence, these people usually put forward with the greatest boldness the most offensive passages from the Old and New Testament, interpreting them in the most unchristian manner: the execution of Ananias and Sapphira, the execution of Simon Magus, and the like. All those words of Christ that can be reinterpreted as a justification of cruelty are cited: the driving out from the temple, “It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for this city”, and the like.

According to the notions of these people, a Christian government is not in the least obliged to be guided by the spirit of humility, forgiveness of injuries and love of enemies.

To refute such an assertion is useless, because the people who assert it refute themselves, or rather cut themselves off from Christ, inventing their own Christ and their own Christianity in place of the one in whose name both the church and the position they hold in it exist. If all people knew that the church preaches a Christ who executes and does not forgive and makes war, then no one would believe in this church and there would be no one to whom to prove what it proves.

The second way, somewhat less coarse, consists in asserting that although Christ did indeed teach to turn the cheek and to give up the coat, and that this is a very lofty moral demand, yet... that there are evildoers in the world, and if these evildoers are not subdued by force, then the whole world will perish and the good will perish. I found this argument for the first time in John Chrysostom and I show its injustice in the book “What Is My Faith?”.

This argument is groundless because if we allow ourselves to recognise any people as special evildoers (raca), then, in the first place, we thereby destroy the whole meaning of Christian teaching, according to which we are all equal and brothers as sons of one heavenly father; in the second place, because even if God had permitted the use of violence against evildoers, then, since it is quite impossible to find that sure and indubitable definition by which one can certainly tell an evildoer from a non-evildoer, every man or society of people would begin to recognise one another as evildoers, which is what happens now; in the third place, because even if it were possible to tell evildoers from non-evildoers beyond doubt, even then it would be impossible in a Christian society to execute or maim or lock up these evildoers in prisons, because in a Christian society there would be no one to carry this out, since every Christian, as a Christian, is enjoined not to do violence to the evildoer.

The third way of answering, still more subtle than the preceding one, consists in asserting that although the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence is binding on a Christian when evil is directed against him personally, it ceases to be binding when evil is directed against his neighbours, and that then a Christian is not only not obliged to fulfil the commandment, but is obliged, for the defence of his neighbours, contrary to the commandment, to use violence against those who do violence.

This assertion is entirely arbitrary, and in the whole of Christ’s teaching no confirmation of such an interpretation can be found. Such an interpretation is not only a limitation of the commandment, but a direct denial and annulment of it. If everyone has the right to use violence when danger threatens another, then the question of using violence comes down to the question of defining what to consider danger to another. And if my private judgment decides the question of danger to another, then there is no case of violence that could not be explained by danger threatening another. They executed and burned sorcerers, they executed aristocrats and Girondists, they executed their enemies too, because those who were in power considered them dangerous to people.

If this important limitation, which undermines the meaning of the commandment at the root, had entered into Christ’s thought, it would have had to be mentioned somewhere. But in the whole of the teacher’s preaching and life not only is this limitation not made, but on the contrary, a warning is given precisely against such a false and offensive limitation, which annuls the commandment. The error and impossibility of such a limitation is shown with particular vividness in the Gospel in the account of the reasoning of Caiaphas, who made precisely this limitation. He granted that it was not good to execute the innocent Jesus, but he saw in this a danger not for himself but for the whole people, and therefore said: “it is better for one man to perish than the whole people.” And still more vividly is the denial of such a limitation expressed in the words spoken to Peter at his attempt to resist by violence the evil directed against Jesus (Matt. XXVI, 52). Peter was defending not himself but his beloved and divine teacher. And Christ directly forbade him this, saying that he who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword.

Besides, the justification of violence used against one neighbour to defend another neighbour from worse violence is always untrue, because when violence is used against an evil not yet committed, one can never know which evil will be greater — the evil of my violence, or that from which I want to defend. We execute a criminal, freeing society from him, and we can by no means know whether the former criminal would not have changed tomorrow, and whether our execution is not a useless cruelty. We lock up a member of society who is dangerous in our opinion, but from tomorrow this man might have ceased to be dangerous and his confinement is in vain. I see that a robber known to me is pursuing a girl; I have a gun in my hand — I kill the robber, I save the girl; but the death or wounding of the robber has certainly been done, while what would have happened if this had not been done is unknown to me. And what an enormous amount of evil must come, as it does come, from people’s recognising for themselves the right to forestall evil that may happen. 0.99 of the evil of the world, from the Inquisition to dynamite bombs and the executions and sufferings of tens of thousands of so-called political criminals, is founded on this reasoning.

The fourth, still more refined answer to the question of how a Christian ought to regard Christ’s commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence consists in asserting that the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence is not denied by them, but is recognised, like every other, only they do not ascribe to this commandment a special, exclusive significance, as the sectarians do. To ascribe to this commandment the status of an unchanging condition of Christian life, as Garrison, Ballou, Dymond, the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Shakers do, and as the Moravian brethren, the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Bogomils, the Paulicians did, is one-sided sectarianism. This commandment has neither more nor less significance than all the others, and a man who through weakness has transgressed any commandment whatever, including the commandment of non-resistance, does not cease to be a Christian if he believes rightly.

This evasion is very skilful, and many people who wish to be deceived are easily deceived by it. The evasion consists in reducing a direct conscious denial of the commandment to a chance breach of it. But one need only compare the attitude of the church teachers to this and to the other commandments they really recognise, to be convinced that the attitude of the church teachers to the commandments they recognise and to this one is entirely different.

The commandment against fornication they really do recognise, and therefore never in any case do they admit that fornication is not evil. Never do the church preachers point out cases in which the commandment against fornication ought to be broken, and they always teach that one must avoid the temptations that lead into temptation against fornication. But it is not so with the commandment of non-resistance. All the church preachers know cases in which this commandment may be broken. And so they teach people. And not only do they not teach them to avoid these temptations, the chief of which is the oath, but they themselves perform it. The church preachers never in any case preach the breaking of any other commandment. But with regard to the commandment of non-resistance they directly teach that one should not understand this prohibition too literally, that not only is it not always necessary to fulfil the commandment, but that there are conditions, positions, in which one must do the direct opposite, that is, judge, make war, execute. So that on the occasion of the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence what is preached in most cases is how not to fulfil it. The fulfilment of this commandment, they say, is very difficult and belongs only to perfection. But how can it not be difficult, when breaking it is not only not forbidden but directly encouraged, when courts, prisons, cannons, guns, armies, battles are directly blessed?

So it is untrue that this commandment is recognised by the church preachers on a level with the other commandments. The church preachers directly do not recognise it and, only not daring to admit this, try to hide their non-recognition of it.

Such is the fourth way of answering.

The fifth way, the subtlest, the most used and the most powerful, consists in evading an answer, in pretending that this question was settled by someone long, long ago quite clearly and satisfactorily, and that it is not worth talking about.

This way is used by all more or less cultured spiritual writers, that is, by those who feel the laws of logic binding on themselves. Knowing that the contradiction existing between the teaching of Christ, which we profess in words, and the whole order of our life cannot be untangled with words, and that by touching it one can only make it still more evident, they, with greater or lesser dexterity, pretending that the question of uniting Christianity with violence has already been settled or does not exist at all, go round it.²

The majority of the spiritual critics of my book use this way. I could cite dozens of such criticisms, in which, without exception, one and the same thing is repeated: everything is talked about, only not what makes up the chief subject of the book. As a characteristic example of such criticisms I will cite an article by the famous, refined English writer and preacher Farrar, a great master, like many learned theologians, of going round and passing over in silence. This article is printed in the American journal “Forum” for October 1888.

Having conscientiously and briefly set out the content of my book, Farrar says:

“Tolstoy has come to the conviction that the world was crudely deceived when people were assured that Christ’s teaching ‘resist not evil, or by evil’ is compatible with war, courts, the death penalty, divorces, the oath, national partialities, and in general with most of the institutions of civil and social life. He now believes that the kingdom of God will come when people fulfil Christ’s 5 commandments, namely: 1) to live in peace with all people; 2) to lead a pure life; 3) not to swear; 4) never to resist evil and 5) to renounce national distinctions.”

“Tolstoy,” he says, “denies the divine inspiration of the Old Testament, of the epistles, denies all the dogmas of the church, such as the Trinity, the redemption, the descent of the Holy Spirit, the priesthood, and recognises only the words and commandments of Christ.” “But is such an interpretation of Christ’s teaching correct?” he says. “Are all people obliged to act as Tolstoy teaches, that is, to fulfil Christ’s 5 commandments?”

One fully expects that to this essential question, which alone could have moved a man to write an article about the book, the man will say that this interpretation of Christ’s teaching is correct and that one must follow it, or will say that such an interpretation is incorrect, will prove why, and will give another correct interpretation of those words that I interpret incorrectly. But nothing of the kind is done. Farrar expresses only a “conviction” that “Tolstoy, though guided by the noblest sincerity, has fallen into the error of partial and one-sided interpretations of the meaning of the Gospel and of the mind (mind) and will of Christ.”

What this error consists in is not explained; it is only said: “To go into the proofs of this is impossible in this article, because I have already exceeded the number of pages allotted to me.”

And he concludes with a calm spirit:

“Meanwhile, if the reader feels troubled by the thought that he is obliged, as a Christian, like Tolstoy, to leave his accustomed conditions of life and live like a simple worker, then let him calm himself and keep to the principle: ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum’.³ ‘With few exceptions,’ he continues, ‘all Christendom from apostolic times to our days has come to the conviction that Christ’s aim was to give people a great principle, but not to destroy the foundations of the institution of all human society, which rests on divine establishment (sanction) and on necessity. If it were my task to prove how impossible is the teaching of communism, which Tolstoy founds on divine paradoxes (sic), which can only be interpreted on the basis of historical principles in agreement with all the methods of Christ’s teaching, this would require more space than I have at my disposal.’”

What a misfortune, he has no space! And a strange thing: for 15 centuries now no one has had space to prove that Christ, whom we profess, said something quite other than what he said. And they could prove it if they wanted to. However, it is not worth proving what everyone knows. It is enough to say: “Securus judicat orbis terrarum.”

And such, without exception, are all the criticisms of cultured believing people, who therefore understand the danger of their position. The only way out of it for them is the hope that, using the authority of the church, of antiquity, of holiness, they can confuse the reader, distract him from the thought of reading the Gospel himself and thinking the question over himself with his own mind. And this succeeds.

Who indeed will think that everything that is repeated with such assurance and solemnity from age to age by all these archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, most holy synods and popes — that all this is a vile lie and slander, laid by them upon Christ to secure the money they need for a sweet life on the necks of other people — a lie and slander so evident, especially now, that the only possibility of continuing this lie consists in intimidating people with their assurance, their shamelessness.

It is all the same as what took place in recent years at the military recruiting boards: at a table, behind the zertsalo, in the front places, under a full-length portrait of the emperor, sit old, important officials in regalia, and they chat freely and casually, write, give orders and call people up. Right there, with a pectoral cross and in a silk cassock, with grey hair let out over his stole, a seemly old priest stands before a lectern on which lies a golden cross and a Gospel bound in wrought gold.

They call Ivan Petrov. A youth comes out, poorly, dirtily dressed, frightened, with trembling muscles of the face and glittering darting eyes, and in a breaking voice, almost in a whisper, says: “I... by the law... I, as a Christian... I cannot...”.

“What is he muttering?” asks the chairman impatiently, screwing up his eyes and listening, raising his head from the book.

“Speak louder!” the colonel with gleaming epaulettes shouts at him.

“I... I... as a Christian...”

And at last it turns out that the youth refuses military service because he is a Christian.

“Don’t talk nonsense. Stand to be measured. Doctor, kindly measure him. Fit?”

“Fit.”

“Father, administer the oath.”

Not only is no one troubled, but no one even pays attention to what this frightened, pitiful youth is babbling. “They all babble something, and we have no time, we still have so many to take in.”

The recruit wants to say something more. — “This is against the law of Christ.”

“Go along, go along, it is known without you what is according to the law and what is not, and you be off. Father, admonish him. Next: Vasily Nikitin.”

And the trembling youth is led away. And to whom — to the guards, or to Vasily Nikitin, who is being brought in, or to all who saw this scene from the side — will it occur that those unclear short words of the youth, at once hushed up by the authorities, contain the truth, while those loud, solemnly pronounced speeches of the self-assured, calm officials and the priest are a lie, a deception?

The same impression is produced by the articles not of Farrar alone, but by all those solemn sermons, articles and books which appear from every side as soon as a truth exposing the reigning lie shows through anywhere. At once long, clever, elegant, solemn conversations or writings begin about questions closely touching the subject, with skilful silence about the subject itself.

In this consists the fifth and most effective way of removing the contradiction in which church Christianity has placed itself, professing Christ in words and denying his teaching in life and teaching people to do the same.

Those who justify themselves by the first way, directly, coarsely asserting that Christ permitted violence — wars, killings — cut themselves off from Christ’s teaching; those who defend themselves by the second, third and fourth ways get themselves tangled up, and it is easy to convict them of their untruth; but these last, who do not reason, who do not deign to reason, but hide behind their greatness and pretend that all this was settled long ago by them or by someone else and is no longer subject to any doubt — these seem invulnerable, and will be invulnerable as long as people remain under the effect of the hypnotic suggestion brought upon them by governments and churches, and do not shake themselves free of it.

So the spiritual people, that is, those who profess faith in Christ, treated my book. And they could not treat it otherwise: they are bound by the contradiction in which they find themselves — faith in the divinity of the teacher and unbelief in his clearest words — from which they must somehow extricate themselves, and therefore one could not expect from them free judgments on the very essence of the question, on that change in people’s life which follows from applying Christ’s teaching to the existing order. Judgments of that kind I expected from the secular, freethinking critics, who are in no way bound to Christ’s teaching and can look at it freely. I expected that the freethinking writers would look on Christ not only as the founder of a religion of worship and personal salvation (as churchmen understand him), but, to put it in their language, also as a reformer who destroys the old foundations of life and gives new ones, whose reform has not yet been accomplished but continues even now.

Such a view of Christ and his teaching follows from my book. But, to my astonishment, among the criticisms of my book that appeared in great numbers there was not one, either Russian or foreign, that treated the subject from the very side from which it is set out in the book, that is, that looked on Christ’s teaching as a philosophical, moral and social (to speak again in the language of scientific people) teaching. In not one criticism was this done.

The Russian secular critics, having understood my book as if its whole content came down to non-resistance to evil, and having understood the teaching of non-resistance to evil itself (probably for the convenience of objecting) as if it forbade all struggle with evil — the Russian secular critics attacked this teaching with irritation and for several years very successfully proved that Christ’s teaching is wrong, since it forbids resisting evil. Their refutations of this imaginary teaching of Christ were all the more successful because they knew beforehand that their reasonings could be neither refuted nor corrected, since the censorship, having not passed the book, did not pass articles in its defence either.

What is remarkable here is that among us, where one cannot say a word about holy scripture without a ban by the censorship, for several years in all the journals Christ’s directly and exactly expressed commandment (Matt. V, 39) was distorted, criticised, condemned, ridiculed.

The Russian secular critics, obviously not knowing all that had been done in working out the question of non-resistance to evil, and sometimes even as if supposing that I personally had invented the rule of non-resistance to evil by violence, attacked the very thought, refuting it, distorting it, and with great heat putting forward arguments long, long ago examined from every side and refuted, proved that a man must without fail defend (by violence) all the injured and oppressed, and that therefore the teaching of non-resistance to evil by violence is an immoral teaching.

To all the Russian critics the whole significance of Christ’s preaching appeared only in this, that it, as if to spite them, hinders a certain activity directed against what they at the given moment consider evil, so that it turned out that the principle of non-resistance to evil by violence was attacked by two opposite camps: the conservatives because this principle hindered their activity of resisting the evil done by the revolutionaries, their persecutions and executions; and the revolutionaries because this principle hindered resistance to the evil done by the conservatives and their overthrow. The conservatives were indignant that the teaching of non-resistance to evil by violence hinders the energetic suppression of revolutionary elements which may destroy the well-being of the people; the revolutionaries were indignant that the teaching of non-resistance to evil by violence hinders the overthrow of the conservatives, who are destroying the well-being of the people. What is remarkable here is that the revolutionaries attacked the principle of non-resistance to evil by violence in spite of the fact that it is the most terrible and dangerous for every despotism, since, as long as the world has stood, all violence, from the Inquisition to the Schlüsselburg fortress, has been founded and is founded on the opposite principle, the necessity of resisting evil by violence.

Besides this, the Russian critics also pointed out that applying the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence to life would turn mankind off the path of civilisation along which it is going. And the path of civilisation along which European mankind is going is, in their opinion, the very one along which all mankind must always go.

Such was the chief character of the Russian critics.

The foreign critics started from the same foundations, but their reasonings about my book differed somewhat from the reasonings of the Russian critics, not only in less irritability and greater culture, but in the substance of the matter.

Reasoning about my book, and about Gospel teaching in general as it is expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, the foreign critics asserted that such teaching is not properly Christian (Christian teaching, in their opinion, is Catholicism and Protestantism) — while the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is only a series of very sweet impractical dreams du charmant docteur, as Renan says, fit for the naive and half-savage inhabitants of Galilee who lived 1800 years ago, and for Russian half-savage muzhiks — Syutayev, Bondarev — and the Russian mystic Tolstoy, but in no way applicable to the high level of European culture.

The foreign secular critics tried in a subtle manner, without insulting me, to let me feel that my judgments, that mankind can be guided by such a naive teaching as the Sermon on the Mount, come partly from my ignorance, my not knowing history, not knowing all those vain attempts to realise the principles of the Sermon on the Mount in life which were made in history and came to nothing, and partly from not understanding the full significance of that high culture on which European mankind now stands, with its Krupp cannons, smokeless powder, colonisation of Africa, government of Ireland, parliament, journalism, strikes, constitution and Eiffel Tower.

So wrote Vogüé, so wrote Leroy-Beaulieu, so wrote Matthew Arnold, so wrote the American writer Savage, and Ingersoll, the popular American freethinking preacher, and many others.

“Christ’s teaching is no good, because it does not correspond to our industrial age,” Ingersoll says naively, expressing with perfect exactness and naivety the very thing that the subtly educated people of our time think of Christ’s teaching. The teaching is no good for our industrial age, exactly as if the fact that an industrial age exists were a sacred thing that must not and cannot be changed. Rather as if drunkards answered advice on how to bring themselves into a sober state by saying that this advice is out of place in their alcoholic state.

The reasonings of all the secular writers, both Russian and foreign, however different their tone and manner of argument, all in essence come down to one and the same strange misunderstanding, namely that Christ’s teaching, one of whose consequences is non-resistance to evil by violence, is unsuitable for us because it demands a change of our life.

Christ’s teaching is unfit because, if it were fulfilled, our life could not go on; in other words: if we began to live well, as Christ taught us, we could not go on living badly, as we live and are used to living. And the question of non-resistance to evil by violence is not only not discussed, but the very mention that Christ’s teaching includes the demand of non-resistance to evil by violence is already considered sufficient proof that the whole teaching cannot be applied.

And yet it would seem necessary to point to at least some solution of this question, since it lies at the foundation of almost all the affairs that occupy us.

For the question is this: how are conflicts between people to be resolved, when some people consider evil what others consider good, and the other way round? And therefore to consider that evil is what I consider evil, in spite of the fact that my opponent considers it good, is not an answer. There can be only two answers: either to find a true and indisputable criterion of what is evil, or not to resist evil by violence.

The first way out has been tried since the beginning of historical times and, as we all know, has not so far led to successful results.

The second answer — not to resist by violence what we consider evil, until we have found a common criterion — this answer was proposed by Christ.

One may find that the answer given by Christ is wrong; one may put in its place another, better one, by finding such a criterion as would define evil for all indubitably and at once; one may simply not be aware of the essence of the question, as savage peoples are not aware of it; but one cannot, as the learned critics of Christian teaching do, pretend that no question exists at all, or that granting to certain persons or assemblies of people (the less so when these people are ourselves) the right to define evil and resist it by violence solves the question; whereas we all know that such granting does not solve the question in the least, since there are always people who do not grant this right to certain people or assemblies.

And it is precisely this assumption that what seems evil to us is evil, or a complete failure to understand the question, that serves as the basis of the secular critics’ judgments on Christian teaching, so that the judgments on my book, of both church and secular critics, showed me that the majority of people simply do not understand not only Christ’s teaching itself, but even the questions to which it serves as an answer.

III

THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF CHRISTIANITY BY BELIEVERS

The meaning of Christian teaching, clear to a minority, has become completely incomprehensible to the majority of people. The cause of this is a false understanding of Christianity and the false confidence of believers and unbelievers alike that they understand it. For believers the understanding of Christianity is hidden by the church. The appearance of Christian teaching. Its essence and its difference from the heathen teachings. Christianity, not fully understood at first, became clearer and clearer to the people who accepted it, thanks to its correspondence with the truth. At the same time there arose the assertion of an understanding of the true meaning of the teaching, confirmed by the miraculousness of its transmission. The council of the disciples according to Acts. The authoritative and miraculous assertion of the truth of the understanding of Christ’s teaching logically arrived at the recognition of the creed and of the church. The church could not have been founded by Christ. Definitions of the church according to the catechisms. There are always several churches, and always hostile to one another. What heresy is. G. Arnold’s work on heresies. Heresies are manifestations of movement in the churches. The churches divide people and are always hostile to Christianity. What the activity of the Russian church consists in. Matt. XXIII, 23. The Sermon on the Mount or the creed. The Orthodox church hides from the people the true understanding of Christianity. The other churches do the same. All the external conditions of the present day are such that they destroy the teaching of the church, and therefore the churches use every effort to uphold their teaching.

So that both the information I received after my book came out — about how Christian teaching in its direct and true meaning has been understood without ceasing, and is understood, by a minority of people — and the criticisms of it, both church and secular, which deny the possibility of understanding Christ’s teaching in its direct meaning, convinced me that while, on the one hand, the true understanding of this teaching has never ceased for the minority, but has become clearer and clearer, so, on the other hand, for the majority its meaning has been more and more darkened, reaching at last such a degree of darkening that people simply no longer understand the simplest propositions, expressed in the simplest words in the Gospel.

The failure to understand Christ’s teaching in its true, simple and direct meaning in our time, when the light of this teaching has already penetrated all the darkest corners of human consciousness; when, as Christ said, what he spoke into the ear is now already shouted from the housetops; when this teaching is penetrating all sides of human life — family, economic, civil, state and international — this failure to understand would be inexplicable if there were no causes for it.

One of these causes is that believers and unbelievers alike are firmly convinced that Christ’s teaching was understood by them long ago, and so fully, indubitably and finally, that there cannot be any other meaning in it than the one they give it. The cause of this lies in the long duration of the tradition of a false understanding, and therefore a failure to understand it.

The strongest stream of water cannot add a drop of liquid to a vessel that is full.

One can explain the most intricate things to the slowest-witted man if he has not yet formed any idea of them; but one cannot explain the simplest thing to the quickest-witted man if he is firmly convinced that he knows, and moreover knows beyond doubt, what is being conveyed to him.

Christian teaching presents itself to the people of our world as precisely such a teaching, known long ago and beyond doubt to everyone down to all its smallest details, which cannot be understood otherwise than as it has been understood.

Christianity is understood now by those who profess the church teachings as a supernatural, miraculous revelation of everything that is said in the creed; and by unbelievers as a manifestation, outlived by mankind, of its need for faith in the supernatural; as a historical phenomenon that has fully expressed itself in Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism and no longer has any vital significance for us. For believers the meaning of the teaching is hidden by the church, for unbelievers by science.

I will speak first of the first.

1800 years ago, in the midst of the heathen Roman world, there appeared a strange new teaching, unlike any of the former ones, ascribed to the man Christ.

This new teaching was completely new in form as well as in content, both for the Jewish world in which it arose and especially for that Roman world in which it was preached and spread.

In the midst of the elaborated religious rules of Judaism, where, in Isaiah’s words, there was rule upon rule, and in the midst of Roman legislation, worked out to a great degree of perfection, there appeared a teaching that denied not only all deities — all fear of them, all divinations and faith in them — but also all human institutions and all need for them.

In place of all the rules of the former confessions, this teaching put forward only a model of inward perfection, truth and love in the person of Christ, and the consequences of this inward perfection attained by people — the outward perfection foretold by the prophets — the kingdom of God, in which all people will unlearn enmity, will all be taught by God and united by love, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.

In place of threats of punishment for not fulfilling the rules, which the former laws, both religious and state, put forward, in place of the lure of rewards for fulfilling them, this teaching called people to itself only by being the truth. “Whoever wants to know of this teaching, whether it is from God, let him fulfil it” (John VII, 17). “If I speak the truth, why do you not believe me? Why do you seek to kill a man who has told you the truth? Only the truth will set you free. God must be professed only in truth. The whole teaching will be revealed and made clear by the spirit of truth. Do what I say and you will know whether what I say is true” (John VIII).

No proofs of the teaching were put forward except the truth, except the correspondence of the teaching with the truth. The whole teaching consisted in knowing the truth and following it, in grasping the truth more and more and coming closer and closer to it in the deeds of life.

According to this teaching there are no acts that could justify a man, make him righteous; there is only a model of truth that draws hearts to itself — for inward perfection, in the person of Christ, and for outward perfection, in the realisation of the kingdom of God. The fulfilment of the teaching is only in movement along the path pointed out, in coming nearer to perfection: inward — the imitation of Christ, and outward — the establishment of the kingdom of God. A man’s greater or lesser good depends, according to this teaching, not on the degree of perfection he reaches, but on the greater or lesser quickening of the movement.

The movement toward perfection of the publican Zacchaeus, of the harlot, of the thief on the cross is, according to this teaching, a greater good than the motionless righteousness of the Pharisee. The lost sheep is dearer than 99 that were not lost. The prodigal son, the lost and found again coin, are dearer, more beloved by God than those that were not lost.

Every condition, according to this teaching, is only a certain step on the path to unattainable inward and outward perfection, and therefore has no significance. The good is only in movement toward perfection, while stopping at any condition whatever is the cessation of the good.

“Let not the left hand know what the right is doing”, and “no labourer who has taken hold of the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” “Do not rejoice that the devils obey you, but seek that your names be written in heaven.” “Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.” “Seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

The fulfilment of the teaching is only in unceasing movement — in grasping ever higher and higher truth, and in realising it ever more and more within oneself by ever greater and greater love, and outside oneself by an ever greater and greater realisation of the kingdom of God.

It is obvious that this teaching, appearing in the midst of the Jewish and heathen world, could not be accepted by the majority of people, who lived a life completely different from the one this teaching demanded; and that even by those by whom it was accepted, it, being completely opposed to all former views, could not be understood in its full meaning.

Only through a series of misunderstandings, errors, one-sided explanations, corrected and supplemented by generations of people, did the meaning of Christian teaching become clearer and clearer to people. The Christian world-view acted upon the Jewish and the heathen, and the heathen and the Jewish upon the Christian. And the Christian, as the living one, penetrated more and more the dying Jewish and heathen and stood out more and more clearly, freeing itself from the false admixtures laid upon it. People went further and further in grasping the meaning of Christianity and realised it more and more in life.

The longer mankind lived, the more and more the meaning of Christianity became clear to it, as it could not and cannot be otherwise with any teaching about life. Succeeding generations corrected the mistakes of their predecessors and came closer and closer to understanding its true meaning.

So it was from the very first times of Christianity. And it was just then, from its very first times, that people appeared who began to assert of themselves that the meaning they give the teaching is the one true one, and that the proof of this is supernatural phenomena which confirm the rightness of their understanding.

This was the chief cause, first of the failure to understand the teaching, and then of the complete distortion of the teaching.

It was supposed that Christ’s teaching is transmitted to people not like every other truth, but in a special, supernatural way, so that the truth of the understanding of the teaching is proved not by the correspondence of what is transmitted with the demands of reason and of the whole nature of man, but by the miraculousness of the transmission, which serves as indisputable proof of the truth of the understanding. This supposition arose from a failure to understand, and its consequence was the impossibility of understanding.

This began from the very first times, when the teaching was still so incompletely and often wrongly understood, as we see from the Gospels and Acts. The less the teaching was understood, the darker it seemed and the more necessary were external proofs of its truth. The proposition that one should not do to others what one does not want done to oneself did not need to be proved by miracles, and this proposition did not need to demand faith, because this proposition is convincing in itself, corresponding both to reason and to the nature of man; but the proposition that Christ was God had to be proved by quite incomprehensible miracles.

The darker the understanding of Christ’s teaching, the more the miraculous was mixed into it; and the more the miraculous was mixed in, the more the teaching departed from its meaning and became darker; and the more it departed from its meaning and became darker, the more strongly its infallibility had to be asserted, and the less comprehensible the teaching became.

From the very first times one can see from the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles how the failure to understand the teaching called forth the need for proofs through the miraculous and incomprehensible.

According to the book of Acts, this began with that meeting at which the disciples gathered in Jerusalem to settle the question that had arisen of baptising or not baptising the uncircumcised, and of those who eat what is sacrificed to idols.

The very putting of the question showed that those who discussed it did not understand Christ’s teaching, which rejects all external rites: ablutions, purifications, fasts, sabbaths. It is said directly: “not what enters into the mouth defiles, but what comes out of the heart”, and therefore the question of baptising the uncircumcised could arise only among people who loved the teacher, dimly sensed the greatness of his teaching, but still understood the teaching itself very unclearly. And so it was.

In proportion as the members of the meeting did not understand the teaching, so much did they need an external confirmation of their incomplete understanding. And so, to settle a question whose very putting shows a failure to understand the teaching, there were uttered at this meeting, as the book of Acts describes it, for the first time, these terrible words, which were meant to establish externally the rightness of certain assertions and which have done so much evil: “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”, that is, it was asserted that the rightness of what they had resolved was witnessed by the miraculous participation in this decision of the Holy Spirit, that is, of God. But the assertion that the Holy Spirit, that is, God, spoke through the apostles had again to be proved. And so for this it became necessary to assert that at Pentecost the Holy Spirit in the form of tongues of fire came down upon those who asserted this. (In the account the descent of the Holy Spirit comes before the council, but Acts was written long after both the one and the other.) But the descent of the Holy Spirit too had to be confirmed for those who had not seen the tongues of fire (although it is incomprehensible why a tongue of fire kindled above a man’s head shows that what this man will say is indubitable truth), and still more miracles were needed, and healings, raisings from the dead, strikings dead, and all those offensive miracles with which Acts is filled and which not only can never convince anyone of the truth of Christian teaching, but can only push people away from it. The consequences of such a way of asserting the truth were that the more these confirmations of truth by tales of miracles were piled one upon another, the more the teaching itself departed from its original meaning and the more incomprehensible it became.

So it was from the first times, and so it went on, constantly growing stronger, logically arriving in our time at the dogmas of transubstantiation and of the infallibility of the pope, or of the bishops, or of the scriptures, that is, at something completely incomprehensible, which has reached the point of senselessness and of demands for blind faith not in God, not in Christ, not even in the teaching, but in a person, as in Catholicism, or in persons, as in Orthodoxy, or — faith in a little book, as in Protestantism. The more widely Christianity spread and the larger the crowd of unprepared people it took in, the less it was understood, the more decisively the infallibility of the understanding was asserted, and the less possible it became to understand the true meaning of the teaching. Already by the time of Constantine the whole understanding of the teaching had come down to a résumé approved by the secular power — a résumé of the disputes that took place at the council — to the creed, in which it stands: I believe in this, that and the other, and at the end — in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, that is, in the infallibility of those persons who call themselves the church, so that everything came down to a man believing no longer in God, not in Christ, as they revealed themselves to him, but in what the church orders him to believe.

But the church is holy, the church was founded by Christ. God could not leave it to people to interpret his teaching arbitrarily, and therefore he established the church. All these propositions are so untrue and unfounded that one is ashamed to refute them. Nowhere, by nothing, except by the assertion of the churches, is it to be seen that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen mean by the church. In the Gospel there is a warning against the church as an external authority, a most evident and clear one, in the place where it is said that Christ’s disciples should call no one teachers and fathers. But nowhere is anything said about the establishment of what churchmen call the church.

In the Gospels the word “church” is used twice. Once in the sense of an assembly of people settling a dispute; the other time in connection with the obscure words about the rock — Peter — and the gates of hell. From these two mentions of the word “church”, which has the meaning only of an assembly, there is derived what we now mean by the word “church”.

But Christ could by no means have founded the church, that is, what we now understand by this word, because nothing like the concept of a church such as we know now, with sacraments, a hierarchy and, above all, with its assertion of infallibility, existed either in Christ’s words or in the concepts of the people of that time.

That people called what took shape later by the same word that Christ used about something else by no means gives them the right to assert that Christ founded the one true church.

Besides, if Christ had really established such an institution as the church, on which the whole teaching and the whole faith are founded, he would probably have stated this establishment so definitely and clearly, and would have given the one true church — besides tales of miracles, which are used with every kind of superstition — such marks that there could be no doubt at all of its truth; but there is nothing of the kind, and as there were, so there are now, various institutions, each calling itself the one true church.

The Catholic catechism says: L’église est la société de fidèles établie par notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, répandue sur toute la terre et soumise à l’autorité des pasteurs légitimes, principalement notre Saint Père — le Pape,⁴ meaning by pasteurs légitimes a human institution, having the pope at its head and made up of certain persons bound to one another by a certain organisation.

The Orthodox catechism says: “The church is a society founded on earth by Jesus Christ, united into one whole by one divine teaching and sacraments, under the government and guidance of a hierarchy established by God”, meaning by the hierarchy established by God precisely the Greek hierarchy, made up of certain such-and-such persons who are in such-and-such places.

The Lutheran catechism says: “The church is holy Christendom, or the assembly of all believers under Christ, their head, in which the Holy Spirit through the Gospel and the sacraments offers, imparts and makes one’s own the divine salvation”, implying that the Catholic church has gone astray and fallen away and that the true tradition is kept in Lutheranism.

For Catholics the divine church coincides with the Roman hierarchy and the pope. For the Orthodox the divine church coincides with the institution of the Eastern and Russian hierarchy.⁵

For Lutherans the divine church coincides with the assembly of people who recognise the Bible and Luther’s catechism.

Usually, when speaking of the origin of Christianity, people belonging to one of the existing churches use the word “church” in the singular, as though there was and is only one church. But this is entirely untrue. The church, as an institution that asserts of itself that it possesses indubitable truth, appeared only when it was not one, but there were at least two of them.

As long as the believers agreed among themselves and the assembly was one, it had no need to assert itself as the church. Only when the believers divided into opposing parties that denied one another did each side feel the need to assert its own truth, ascribing infallibility to itself. The concept of the one church arose only from the fact that, when two sides disagreed and disputed, each, calling the other side heresy, recognised only its own side as the infallible church.

If we know that there was a church that decided in the year 51 to accept the uncircumcised, then this church appeared only because there was another church — of the Judaizers — that decided not to accept the uncircumcised.

If there is now a Catholic church asserting its infallibility, it is only because there are churches — the Greco-Russian, Orthodox, the Lutheran — each asserting its own infallibility and by that very fact denying all the other churches. So that the one church is only a fantastic notion, having in it not the slightest mark of reality.

As an actual historical phenomenon there have existed and exist only many assemblies of people, each asserting of itself that it is the one church founded by Christ, and that all the others that call themselves churches are heresies and schisms.

The catechisms of the most widespread churches — the Catholic, the Orthodox and the Lutheran — say this directly.

In the Catholic catechism it is said: Quels sont ceux, qui sont hors de l’église? — Les infidèles, les hérétiques, les schismatiques.⁶ The so-called Orthodox are counted as schismatics. The Lutherans are counted as heretics; so that, according to the Catholic catechism, in the church there are only Catholics.

In the so-called Orthodox catechism it is said: By the one church of Christ is meant only the Orthodox, which remains in full agreement with the ecumenical church. As for the Roman church and the other confessions (the Lutherans and others are not even called a church), they cannot be counted as belonging to the one true church, since they have separated themselves from it.

According to this definition the Catholics and Lutherans are outside the church, and in the church there are only the Orthodox.

And the Lutheran catechism reads: Die wahre Kirche wird darin erkannt, dass in ihr das Wort Gottes lauter und rein ohne Menschenzusätze gelehrt und die Sacramente treu nach Christi Einsetzung gewahret werden.⁷

According to this definition all those who have added anything to the teaching of Christ and the apostles, as the Catholic and Greek churches have done, are outside the church. And in the church there are only Protestants.

The Catholics assert that the Holy Spirit has acted without a break in their hierarchy; the Orthodox assert that the same Holy Spirit has acted without a break in their hierarchy; the Arians asserted that the Holy Spirit acted in their hierarchy (they asserted this with the same right with which the reigning churches assert it now); Protestants of every kind — Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterians, Methodists, Swedenborgians, Mormons — assert that the Holy Spirit acts only in their assemblies.

If the Catholics assert that the Holy Spirit, at the time of the division of the Arian and Greek churches, left the churches that fell away and remained in the one true one, then with exactly the same right Protestants of every denomination can assert that at the time of the separation of their church from the Catholic, the Holy Spirit left the Catholic and passed into the church they recognise. And so they do.

Every church derives its confession through an unbroken tradition from Christ and the apostles. And indeed, every Christian confession, coming from Christ, must inevitably have reached the present generation through a certain tradition. But this does not prove that one of these traditions, to the exclusion of all the others, is indubitably true.

Every twig on a tree comes without a break from the root; but the fact that every twig comes from one root by no means proves that each twig is the only one. Just so with the churches. Every church presents exactly the same proofs of its succession, and even of miracles in favour of its truth, as every other; so that the strict and exact definition of what the church is (not as something fantastic that we would like, but as what is and was in reality) is only one: the church is such an assembly of people as assert of themselves that they are in full and sole possession of the truth.

It was these assemblies, which later, with the help of the support of the authorities, turned into powerful institutions, that were the chief obstacles to the spread of the true understanding of Christ’s teaching.

It could not be otherwise: the chief feature distinguishing Christ’s teaching from all former teachings consisted in this, that the people who accepted it strove more and more to understand and fulfil the teaching; while the church teaching asserted its full and final understanding and fulfilment of it.

However strange this seems to us, people brought up in the false teaching about the church as a Christian institution and in contempt for heresy — yet it was only in what was called heresy that the true movement, that is, true Christianity, was, and it ceased to be so only when it stopped in its movement in these heresies and likewise set into the motionless forms of a church.

Indeed, what is heresy? Read through all the theological works that treat of heresies, of the subject that is the first to present itself for definition, since every theology speaks of the true teaching among the false ones, that is, heresies, surrounding it — and nowhere will you find even the semblance of any definition of heresy.

An example of that complete absence of any semblance of a definition of what is understood by the word “heresy” may be the judgment on this subject of the learned historian of Christianity E. de Pressensé in his “Histoire du Dogme”, with the epigraph “Ubi Christus, ibi Ecclesia” (Paris, 1869). Here is what he says in his preface (p. 3): “Je sais, que l’on nous conteste le droit de qualifier ainsi, that is, to call heresies, les tendences, qui furent si vivement combattues par les premiers Pères. La désignation même d’hérésie semble une atteinte portée à la liberté de conscience et de pensée. Nous ne pouvons partager ces scrupules, car ils n’iraient à rien moins qu’à enlever au christianisme tout caractère distinctif”.⁸

And, having said that after Constantine the church did indeed abuse its power of designating those who disagreed as heretics and persecuting them, he says, discussing the first times:

“L’église est une libre association; il y a tout profit à se séparer d’elle. La polémique contre l’erreur n’a d’autres ressources que la pensée et le sentiment. Un tipe doctrinal uniforme n’a pas encore été élaboré; les divergences secondaires se produisent en Orient et en Occident avec une entière liberté, la théologie n’est point liée à d’invariables formules. Si au sein de cette diversité apparaît un fonds commun de croyances, n’est-on pas en droit d’y voir non pas un système formulé et composé par les représentants d’une autorité d’école, mais la foi elle-même, dans son instinct le plus sûr et sa manifestation la plus spontanée? Si cette même unanimité qui se révèle dans les croyances essentielles, se retrouve pour repousser telles ou telles tendances, ne serons-nous pas en droit de conclure que ces tendances étaient en désaccord flagrant avec les principes fondamentaux du christianisme? Cette présomption ne se transformera-t-elle pas en certitude si nous reconnaissons dans la doctrine universellement repoussé par l’Eglise, les traits caractéristiques de l’une des religions du passé? Pour dire que le gnosticisme ou l’ebionitisme sont les formes légitimes de la pensée chrétienne, il faut dire hardiment qu’il n’y a pas de pensée chrétienne, ni de caractère spécifique qui la fasse reconnaître. Sous prétexte de l’élargir on la dissent. Personne, au temps de Platon, n’eût osé couvrir de son nom une doctrine qui n’eût pas fait place à la théorie des idées, et l’on eût excité les justes moqueries de la Grèce, en voulant fair d’Epicure où de Zénon un disciple de l’Académie. Reconnaissons donc que s’il existe une religion ou une doctrine, qui s’appelle le christianisme elle peut avoir ses hérésies”.⁹

The author’s whole reasoning comes down to this, that every judgment that does not agree with the body of dogmas we profess at a given time is heresy. But at a given time and in a given place people do profess something, and this profession of something, somewhere, at some time, cannot be a criterion of truth.

Everything comes down to this: ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia. And Christus is where we are.

Every so-called heresy, recognising as truth what it professes, can in just the same way find in the history of the churches a consistent clarification of what it professes, use all of Pressensé’s arguments for itself, and call only its own confession truly Christian, which all heresies have done and do.

The only definition of heresy (the word αἵρεσις means part) is the name that an assembly of people gives to every judgment that refutes part of the teaching professed by the assembly. A more particular meaning, most often ascribed to heresy, is the meaning of an opinion that refutes the church teaching established and upheld by the secular power.

There is a remarkable, little-known, enormous work (“Unparteiische Kirchen und Ketzer-Historie”, 1729) by Gottfried Arnold, which treats directly of this subject and shows all the unlawfulness, arbitrariness, senselessness and cruelty of using the word “heresy” in the sense of rejection. This book is an attempt to describe the history of Christianity in the form of a history of heresies.

In the introduction the author puts a series of questions: 1) about those who make heretics (von den Ketzermachern selbst); 2) about those who were made heretics; 3) about the subjects of heresy themselves; 4) about the way of making heretics; and 5) about the aims and consequences of making heretics.

On each of these points he puts dozens more questions, the answers to which he gives later from the works of well-known theologians, but above all he leaves it to the reader himself to draw the conclusion from the exposition of the whole book. As samples of these questions, which partly contain the answers in themselves, I will cite the following. Under the 4th point, on how heretics are made, he says in one of the questions (the 7th): “Does not the whole of history show that the greatest makers of heretics and masters of this business were precisely those wise men from whom the father hid his secrets, that is, the hypocrites, the Pharisees and the lawyers, or completely godless and perverted people?” (Q. 20–21): “And were not, in the corrupt times of Christianity, those very people cast aside by the hypocrites and the envious who were especially endowed by God with great gifts, and who in the times of pure Christianity would have been highly honoured? And on the contrary, would not those people who, in the decline of Christianity, raised themselves above everything and declared themselves teachers of the purest Christianity — would not those people in the times of the apostles and the disciples of Christ have been recognised as the most shameful heretics and anti-Christians?”

Among other things, expressing in these questions the thought that the verbal expression of the essence of faith which was demanded by the church, and departure from which was considered heresy, could never fully cover the very world-view of the believer, and that therefore the demand that faith be expressed in certain words was what produced heresies, he says in questions 21 and 33:

“And if divine works and thoughts seem to a man so great and deep that he does not find fitting words to express them, should he be declared a heretic if he cannot express his idea quite exactly? And was it not because of this that in the first times there was no heresy, that Christians judged one another not by verbal expressions but by the heart and by deeds, with complete freedom to express their thoughts, without fear of being declared a heretic? Was it not the most usual and easy way for the church (he says in the 31st question), if the clergy wanted to get rid of or destroy someone, to make this person suspect in his teaching and throw over him the cloak of heresy, and by this condemn and remove this person?”

“Although it is true that among the so-called heretics there were sins and errors, it is no less true and evident from the countless examples cited here (that is, in the history of the church and of heresy),” he says further, “that there is not and has not been a single sincere and conscientious man of some significance who was not, out of envy or other causes, destroyed by churchmen.”

So already almost 200 years ago the meaning of heresy was understood, and in spite of this the concept exists to this day. And it cannot fail to exist as long as the concept of the church exists. Heresy is the reverse side of the church. Where there is a church, there must be the concept of heresy as well. The church is an assembly of people who assert of themselves that they possess indubitable truth. Heresy is the opinion of people who do not recognise the indubitability of the church’s truth.

Heresy is a manifestation of movement in the church, an attempt to break down the stiffened assertion of the church, an attempt at a living understanding of the teaching. Every step of movement forward, of understanding and fulfilling the teaching, was made by heretics: heretics were Tertullian, and Origen, and Augustine, and Luther, and Huss, and Savonarola, and Chelčický and others. It could not have been otherwise.

A disciple of Christ, whose teaching consists in an eternally greater and greater grasping of the teaching and a greater and greater fulfilling of it, in movement toward perfection, cannot, precisely because he is a disciple of Christ, assert of himself or of another that he understands Christ’s teaching fully and fulfils it; still less can he assert this of any assembly.

At whatever stage of understanding and perfection a disciple of Christ may be, he always feels the insufficiency of both his understanding and his fulfilment, and always strives for greater understanding and fulfilment. And therefore to assert of oneself or of any assembly that I or we are in possession of a perfect understanding and fulfilment of Christ’s teaching is a renunciation of the spirit of Christ’s teaching.

However strange this seems, the churches, as churches, always have been and cannot fail to be institutions not only alien but directly hostile to Christ’s teaching. Not for nothing did Voltaire call it l’infame (the dishonourable one); not for nothing have all or almost all the Christian so-called sects recognised and recognise the church as that harlot of whom the Apocalypse prophesies; not for nothing is the history of the church the history of the greatest cruelties and horrors.

The churches, as churches, are not some institutions having a Christian principle at their foundation, though having strayed somewhat from the straight path, as many think; the churches, as churches, as assemblies asserting their infallibility, are anti-Christian institutions. Between the churches, as churches, and Christianity there is not only nothing in common except the name, but these are two completely opposite and mutually hostile principles. The one is pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility and death; the other is humility, repentance, meekness, movement and life.

One cannot serve these two masters together; one must choose the one or the other.

The servants of the churches of all confessions, especially in recent times, try to present themselves as supporters of movement in Christianity: they make concessions, they wish to correct the abuses that have crept into the churches, and they say that because of abuses one cannot deny the very principle of the Christian church, which alone can unite all into one and be a mediator between people and God. But all this is untrue. Not only have the churches never united, but they have always been one of the chief causes of the disunion of people, of hatred toward one another, of wars, slaughters, inquisitions, St. Bartholomew’s nights and the like; and the churches never serve as mediators between people and God, which is not needed and which is directly forbidden by Christ, who revealed his teaching directly, immediately to every man — but they put dead forms in place of God, and not only do not reveal God but screen him from people. The churches, which arose from a failure to understand and uphold this failure to understand by their immobility, cannot fail to persecute and drive out every understanding of the teaching. They try to hide this, but it is impossible, because every movement forward along the path pointed out by Christ destroys their existence.

You listen to and read the articles and sermons in which the church writers of modern times of all confessions speak about Christian truths and virtues; you listen to and read these skilful reasonings, exhortations, confessions, worked out over centuries, sometimes seemingly like sincere ones, and you are ready to doubt that the churches could be hostile to Christianity: “it cannot be that these people, who put forward such people as the Chrysostoms, Fénelons, Butlers and other preachers of Christianity, were hostile to it.” One wants to say: “the churches may have strayed from Christianity, erred, but they could not have been hostile to it.” But you look at the fruits in order to judge the tree, as Christ taught, and you see that their fruits were evil, that the consequence of their activity was the distortion of Christianity, and you cannot help admitting that, however good the people were, the work of the church in which these people took part was unchristian. The goodness and merits of all these people who served the churches were the goodness and merits of the people, but not of the work they served. All these good people — like both Francises, d’Assise and de Lobes, our Tikhon Zadonsky, Thomas à Kempis and others — were good people in spite of the fact that they served a work hostile to Christianity, and they would have been still better and worthier if they had not fallen into the error they served.

But why speak of the past, judge of the past, which may be falsely represented and is little known to us: the churches, with their foundations and their activity, are not a thing of the past; the churches are before us now, and we can judge them in fact by their activity, by their influence on people.

What then does the activity of the churches consist in now? How do they influence people? What is done by the churches among us, among the Catholics, among Protestants of every denomination; what does their activity consist in, and what are the consequences of their activity?

The activity of our Russian, so-called Orthodox, church is in view of everyone. It is an enormous fact, which cannot be hidden and about which there can be no dispute.

What does the activity of this Russian church consist in, of this enormous, strenuously acting institution, consisting of a host of half a million, costing the people tens of millions?

The activity of this church consists in instilling by every possible measure into the 100-million mass of the Russian people those backward, outlived beliefs, which now have no justification whatever, which were once professed by people alien to our people and in which almost no one any longer believes, often not even those whose duty is to spread these false beliefs.

Instilling into the people these formulas of the Byzantine clergy, alien to it, outlived and no longer having any meaning for people of our time, about the Trinity, about the Mother of God, about the sacraments, about grace and the like, makes up one part of the activity of the Russian church; the other part of its activity is the activity of upholding idolatry in the most direct sense of this word: the veneration of holy relics and icons, the offering of sacrifices to them and expecting from them the fulfilment of wishes. I will not speak of what is said and written by the clergy with a tinge of scholarship and liberalism in the clerical journals, but will speak of what is actually done by the clergy throughout the vast Russian land among a people of 100 million. What is the people taught, diligently, unfailingly, strenuously, everywhere alike? What is demanded of it by virtue of the so-called Christian faith?

I will begin from the beginning, from the birth of a child: at the birth of a child they teach that a prayer must be read over the child and the mother in order to purify them, since without this prayer the mother who has given birth is unclean. For this the priest, before images of saints, which the people call simply gods, takes the child in his hands and reads words of exorcism and by this purifies the mother. Then it is instilled into the parents, and even demanded of them under fear of punishment for not doing it, that the child must without fail be baptised, that is, dipped by the priest three times into water, while words understood by no one are read and still less understandable actions are performed — the anointing of various parts of the body with oil, the cutting of hair, and the blowing and spitting of the godparents at an imaginary devil. All this is supposed to purify the child and make him a Christian. Then it is instilled into the parents that the child must be given communion, that is, given to eat, in the form of bread and wine, a particle of the body of Christ, as a result of which the child will receive into himself the grace of Christ, and so on. Then it is instilled that this child, as he grows, must be taught to pray. To pray means to stand directly before boards on which are painted the faces of Christ, the Mother of God, the saints, and to bow with the head, with the whole body, and with the right hand, with the fingers folded in a certain way, to touch the forehead, the shoulders and the belly, and to pronounce Slavonic words, of which the most used and the ones instilled into all children are: Mother of God, Virgin, rejoice, and so on. Then it is instilled into the one being brought up that at the sight of every church and icon he must again do the same, that is, cross himself; then it is instilled that on feast days (feast days are the days on which Christ was born, though no one knows when that was, the days on which he was circumcised, on which the Mother of God died, on which the cross was brought, on which an icon was brought in, on which a holy fool saw a vision, and the like) — on feast days one must put on one’s best clothes and go to church and buy and set candles there before the images of saints, hand in little notes and lists of names for commemoration and little loaves, for triangles to be cut out of them, and then pray many times for the health and well-being of the tsar and the bishops and for oneself and one’s affairs, and then kiss the cross and the priest’s hand.

Besides this prayer, it is instilled further that every year, at least once, one must prepare for communion. To prepare for communion means to go into the church and tell the priest one’s sins, supposing that this telling of one’s sins to a stranger cleanses one completely from sins, and then to eat from a little spoon a bit of bread with wine, which cleanses still more. Then it is instilled that if a man and a woman want their carnal intercourse to be holy, they must come to church, put metal crowns on themselves, drink a drink, walk three times round a table to the sound of singing, and that then the carnal intercourse of the man and the woman will become holy and quite special, different from all others.

In life it is instilled that one must keep the following rules: not to eat meat and milk on certain days, on other certain days to have prayer services and requiems held for the dead, on feast days to receive the priest and give him money, and several times a year to take boards with images from the church and carry them on towels through the fields and houses. And before death it is instilled that a man must without fail eat bread with wine from a little spoon, and better still if he has time to be anointed with oil. This secures for him well-being in the future life. And after death it is instilled into his relatives that for the salvation of the dead man’s soul it is useful to put into his hands a printed paper with a prayer; it is useful too that a certain book be read over the dead body and that the name of the dead man be pronounced in church at a certain time.

In this consists the faith considered obligatory for everyone.

But if anyone especially wants to take care of his soul, then according to this faith it is instilled that the greatest security of the soul’s bliss in the other world is attained also by giving money to churches and monasteries, thereby obliging holy people to pray for oneself. Further, according to this faith, pilgrimages to monasteries and the kissing of miracle-working icons and relics are saving for the soul.

According to this faith miracle-working icons and relics concentrate in themselves a special holiness, power and grace, and nearness to these objects — touching, kissing, setting candles before them, crawling under them — contributes much to salvation, as do prayer services ordered before these holy things.

And it is this faith, and no other, called Orthodox, that is, the real faith, that under the guise of the Christian has been instilled into the people with all their strength for many centuries, and with special strain now.

And let it not be said that the Orthodox teachers place the essence of the teaching in something else, and that these are only ancient forms which it is not considered necessary to destroy. This is untrue: throughout all Russia, by all the Russian clergy, and in recent times with special strain, only this faith is instilled. There is nothing else. Other things are talked and written about in the capitals, but among the people of a hundred million only this is done and only this is instilled, and nothing more. The churchmen talk about other things, but this they instil by every possible measure.

All this, and the worship of persons and icons, has been brought into theology, into the catechisms; the people are diligently taught this theoretically and practically; hypnotising them by all the means of solemnity, splendour, authority, violence, they make them believe in this, and jealously guard this faith against every attempt to free the people from these savage superstitions.

Before my eyes, as I said, on the occasion of my book, for many years Christ’s teaching and his own words about non-resistance to evil were the subject of mockery, of fairground jokes, and the churchmen not only did not oppose this but encouraged this blasphemy; but try saying a disrespectful word about the hideous idol which is blasphemously carted about Moscow by drunken people under the name of the Iverskaya, and a groan of indignation will rise from these very Orthodox churchmen. Only the outward cult of idolatry is preached. And let it not be said that the one does not hinder the other, that “these things you ought to have done, and not to leave the other undone”, that “all that they bid you observe, observe and do; but do not act according to their deeds, for they say and do not do” (Matt. XXIII, 23, 3). This was said of the Pharisees, who fulfilled all the outward precepts of the law, and therefore the words “what they bid you observe, observe” refer to deeds of mercy and goodness, while the words “but do not act according to their deeds, for they say but do not do” refer to the performance of rites and the neglect of deeds of goodness, and have exactly the reverse meaning of the one the churchmen want to give this passage, interpreting it as an order to observe rites. An outward cult and the service of mercy and truth are hard to combine; for the most part the one excludes the other. So it was with the Pharisees, so it is now with church Christians.

If a man can be saved by redemption, by sacraments, by prayer, then good deeds are no longer needed by him.

The Sermon on the Mount or the creed: one cannot believe both. And the churchmen chose the latter: the creed is learned and read as a prayer, in the churches too, while the Sermon on the Mount is excluded even from the Gospel readings in the churches, so that in the churches the parishioners will never hear it, except on those days when the whole Gospel is read. And it cannot be otherwise: people who believe in a wicked and senseless God — who cursed the human race and doomed his son to be a sacrifice and part of mankind to eternal torment — cannot believe in a God of love. A man who believes in God-Christ coming again in glory to judge and execute the living and the dead cannot believe in the Christ who commands to turn the cheek to the one who injures, not to judge, to forgive and to love enemies. A man who believes in the divine inspiration of the Old Testament and the holiness of David, who on his deathbed bequeathed the murder of an old man who had insulted him and whom he could not kill himself, since he was bound by an oath (3rd Book of Kings, chapter 2, verse 8), and similar abominations with which the Old Testament is full, cannot believe in the moral law of Christ; a man who believes the teaching and preaching of the church about the compatibility of executions and wars with Christianity can no longer believe in the brotherhood of all people.

Above all, a man who believes in people’s salvation by faith in the redemption or in the sacraments can no longer put all his strength into fulfilling Christ’s moral teaching in life.

A man taught by the church the blasphemous teaching that a man cannot be saved by his own strength, but that there is another means, will inevitably resort to this means and not to his own strength, on which, he is assured, it is a sin to rely. Church teaching — every church teaching, with its redemption and sacraments — excludes Christ’s teaching, the Orthodox teaching with its idolatry all the more.

“But the people itself always believed so, and believes so now,” they will say to this. “The whole history of the Russian people proves it. One cannot deprive the people of its tradition.” This is just where the deception lies. The people did once profess something like what the church professes now, though far from the same thing (among the people, besides this fanaticism of icons, house-spirits, relics and Semik feasts with wreaths and birch boughs, there was always also a deep moral, living understanding of Christianity, which there never was in the church as a whole, but was met only in its best representatives); but the people, in spite of all the obstacles that the state and the church put in its way in this, has long since outlived this coarse stage of understanding in its best representatives, which it shows by the rationalist sects that spring up of themselves everywhere, with which Russia now swarms and with which the churchmen now struggle so unsuccessfully. The people is going forward in awareness of the moral, living side of Christianity. And it is just here that the church appears, with its not upholding but intensified instilling of outlived heathenism in its finished form, with its effort to push the people back again into that darkness from which it is breaking out with such effort.

“We teach the people nothing new, but only what it believes, only in a more perfect form,” say the priests. This is the same as what a man would be doing who tied up a growing chick and stuffed it back into the shell it had come out of.

I have often been struck by this observation, which would be comic if its consequences were not so terrible: how people, linked together in a circle, deceive one another and cannot get out of this enchanted circle.

The first question, the first doubt of a Russian man beginning to think, is the question of the miracle-working icons and, above all, of the relics: is it true that they are incorruptible and that miracles are worked by them? Hundreds and thousands of people put these questions to themselves and find it hard to resolve them chiefly because the bishops, metropolitans and all highly placed people kiss the relics and the wonder-working icons. Ask the bishop and the highly placed persons why they do this, and they will say they do it for the people; while the people kiss them because the bishops and highly placed persons do it.

The activity of the Russian church, in spite of all that outward gloss of modernity, learning, spirituality that its members now begin to assume in their writings, articles, in the clerical journals and sermons, consists only in not only keeping the people in that state of coarse and savage idolatry in which it was, but in strengthening and spreading superstition and religious ignorance besides, driving out of the people the living understanding of Christianity that lives in it side by side with idolatry.

I remember once, in the monastery bookshop of the Optina Hermitage, I was present while an old muzhik was choosing religious books for his grandson, who could read. A monk was pushing on him a description of relics, of feasts, of appearances of icons, a psalter and the like. I asked the old man whether he had a Gospel. No. “Give him the Russian Gospel,” I said to the monk. “That does not suit them,” the monk said to me.

That, in compressed form, is the activity of our church.

But this is so only in barbarous Russia, the European or American reader will say to this. And such a judgment will be just, but only in so far as this judgment refers to the government, which helps the church to carry out its stupefying and corrupting action in Russia.

It is just that nowhere in Europe is there a government so despotic and so much in agreement with the reigning church. And therefore the part of the authorities in corrupting the people is strongest in Russia; but it is not just that the Russian church in its influence on the people differs in anything from any other church.

The churches are the same everywhere, and if the Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran do not have at hand so obedient a government as the Russian, this comes not from any absence of desire to make use of one.

The church as a church, whatever it may be — Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian — every church, in so far as it is a church, cannot fail to strive for the same thing as the Russian church: to hide the real meaning of Christ’s teaching and replace it with its own teaching, which obliges to nothing, excludes the possibility of understanding the true, active teaching of Christ, and, above all, justifies the existence of priests who feed at the people’s expense.

Has Catholicism done, and does it do, anything else, with its ban on reading the Gospel and its demand for unreasoning submission to church leaders and to the infallible pope? Does Catholicism preach anything other than the Russian church? The same outward cult, the same relics, miracles and statues, wonder-working Notre-Dames and processions. The same loftily foggy judgments about Christianity in books and sermons, and when it comes to the deed, the upholding of the coarsest idolatry.

And is not the very same thing done in Anglicanism, Lutheranism, in every Protestantism that has taken shape as a church? The same demands on the flock for faith in dogmas expressed in the 4th century and which have lost all meaning for people of our time, and the same demand for idolatry, if not before relics and icons, then before the sabbath day and the letter of the Bible. Always the same activity directed toward hiding the real demands of Christianity and putting in their place an externality that obliges to nothing, and cant, as the English excellently name the very occupation to which they are especially prone. Among Protestants this activity is especially noticeable because this confession does not even have the excuse of antiquity. And is not the very same thing happening in present-day revivalism — the renewed Calvinism, evangelicalism, from which the Salvation Army has degenerated?

As the position of all the church teachings with respect to Christ’s teaching is the same, so too are their methods the same.

Their position is such that they cannot help straining every effort to hide the teaching of Christ, whose name they make use of.

The inconsistency of all the church confessions with Christ’s teaching is indeed such that special efforts are needed to hide this inconsistency from people. Indeed, one need only think oneself into the position of every grown man of our time, not only educated but the very simplest, who has picked up the notions about geology, physics, chemistry, cosmography, history that are in the air, when for the first time he consciously considers those beliefs, instilled in him in childhood and upheld by the churches: that God created the world in six days; light before the sun; that Noah stuffed all the beasts into his ark, and so on; that Jesus is also God the Son, who created everything before time; that this God came down to earth for Adam’s sin; that he rose again, ascended and sits at the right hand of the father and will come on the clouds to judge the world, and so on.

For all these propositions, worked out by people of the 4th century and having a certain meaning for people of that time, have none for people of our time. People of our time can repeat these words with their lips, but cannot believe them, because these words — such as that God lives in heaven, that heaven opened and a voice said something from there, that Christ rose again and flew off somewhere into heaven and will come again from somewhere on the clouds, and so on — have no meaning for us.

A man who considered the sky a finite, solid vault could believe or not believe that God created the sky, that the sky opened, that Christ flew off into the sky, but for us all these words have no significance whatever. People of our time can only believe that one must believe this, which they do; but they cannot believe in what has no meaning for them.

And if all these expressions are supposed to have an allegorical meaning and are prefigurations, then we know, first, that not all churchmen agree on this, but on the contrary the majority insist on understanding holy scripture in the direct sense; and second, that these interpretations are very various and are confirmed by nothing.

But even if a man does want to force himself to believe the teaching of the churches as it is taught, the universal spread of literacy and of the Gospels, and the intercourse of people of different confessions with one another, make up another, still more insuperable obstacle to this.

For a man of our time need only buy a Gospel for 3 kopecks and read the clear words of Christ to the Samaritan woman, not open to reinterpretation, that the father needs worshippers not in Jerusalem, not on that mountain or on this one, but worshippers in spirit and in truth; or the words that a Christian must pray not like a heathen in temples and in view of others, but in secret, that is, in his closet; or that a disciple of Christ must call no one father or teacher — one need only read these words to be convinced that no spiritual pastors, who call themselves teachers in opposition to Christ’s teaching and dispute among themselves, make up any authority, and that what the churchmen teach us is not Christianity. But even that is not all: if a man of our time did go on believing in miracles and did not read the Gospel, mere intercourse with people of other confessions and faiths, which has become so easy in our time, will make a man doubt the truth of his faith. It was all very well for a man who had not seen people of a confession other than his own to believe that his confession is the one true one; but a thinking man need only come up against, as now happens constantly, people of different confessions, equally good and bad, who condemn one another’s faiths, in order to doubt the truth of the faith he professes. In our time only a man completely ignorant, or completely indifferent to the questions of life that are sanctified by religion, can remain in the church faith.

What tricks and efforts, then, the churches need in order, in spite of all these conditions that destroy faith, to go on building churches, serving masses, preaching, teaching, converting, and, above all, receiving for this an enormous maintenance, as all these priests, pastors, intendants, superintendents, abbés, archdeacons, bishops and archbishops do.

Special, supernatural efforts are needed. And such efforts, straining them more and more, the churches do use. Here in Russia (besides all the others) the simple, coarse violence of the authorities, obedient to the church, is used. People who depart from the outward expression of faith and say so are either directly punished or deprived of rights; while people who strictly keep to the outward forms of faith are rewarded and given rights.

So the Orthodox act; but all the churches without exception also use every means for this, the chief of which is what is now called hypnotisation.

All the arts, from architecture to poetry, are set to work to act on people’s souls and to stupefy them, and this action goes on unceasingly. This necessity of a hypnotising action on people, to bring them into a state of stupefaction, is especially evident in the activity of the Salvation Army, which uses new methods, unfamiliar to us, of trumpets, drums, songs, banners, costumes, processions, dances, tears and dramatic devices.

But this strikes us only because these are new methods; are not the old methods of the temples, with special lighting, with gold, glitter, candles, choirs, organ, bells, vestments, tearful sermons and so on, the very same thing?

But however strong this action of hypnotisation may be, the chief and most pernicious activity of the churches does not lie in it. The chief and most pernicious activity of the church is the one directed at deceiving children, those very children of whom Christ said, woe to him who causes one of these little ones to stumble. From the very first awakening of a child’s consciousness they begin to deceive him, to instil into him with solemnity what those who instil it do not themselves believe, and to instil it until the deception, by means of habit, grows together with the child’s nature. The child is diligently deceived in the most important matter in life, and when the deception has grown so together with his life that it is already hard to tear it away, then the whole world of science and reality is opened before the child, which can in no way be reconciled with the beliefs instilled into him, leaving him to sort out these contradictions himself as best he can.

Indeed, if one set oneself the task of confusing a man so that he could not, with a sound mind, get out of two opposite world-views instilled into him from childhood, one could devise nothing stronger than what is done to every young man brought up in our so-called Christian society.

What the churches do to people is terrible, but if one thinks into their position, then those people who make up the institution of the churches cannot act otherwise. The churches face a dilemma: the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene creed — the one excludes the other: if a man sincerely comes to believe in the Sermon on the Mount, the Nicene creed will inevitably lose its meaning and significance for him, and with it the church and its representatives; but if a man believes in the Nicene creed, that is, in the church, that is, in those who call themselves its representatives, then the Sermon on the Mount will become superfluous for him. And therefore the churches cannot help using every possible effort to darken the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount and to draw people to themselves.

Only thanks to the strenuous activity of the churches in this direction has the influence of the churches held up until now. Let the church stop, even for the very shortest time, this action on the masses by hypnotisation and the deception of children, and people will understand Christ’s teaching. And the understanding of the teaching destroys the churches and their significance. And therefore the churches do not for a moment stop their intensified activity of hypnotising adults and deceiving children. And it is this activity of the churches, instilling into people a false understanding of Christ’s teaching, that serves as an obstacle to the understanding of it for the majority of people, the so-called believers.

IV

THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF CHRISTIANITY BY MEN OF SCIENCE

The attitude of men of science to religions in general. What religions are and their significance for the life of humanity. Three understandings of life. The Christian teaching is the expression of the divine understanding of life. The misunderstanding of Christianity by men of science, who study its outward manifestations, comes from their looking at it from the standpoint of the social understanding of life. The opinion arising from this misunderstanding, that Christ's teaching is exaggerated and cannot be fulfilled. The expression of the divine understanding of life in the Gospel. The false judgment of men of science about Christianity comes from their confidence that they possess an infallible instrument of knowledge. From this arise two misunderstandings about the Christian teaching. The 1st misunderstanding, that the teaching cannot be fulfilled, comes from the Christian teaching giving a different guidance for life than the social teaching gives. Christianity gives not a rule but an ideal. To the animal force Christ adds the consciousness of the divine force. Christianity seems to exclude the possibility of life only when the pointing to an ideal is taken for a rule. The ideal must not be lowered. Life, according to Christ's teaching, is movement. The ideal and the commandments. The 2nd misunderstanding, the replacing of love for God and service of him by love and service of humanity. Men of science suppose that their teaching about the service of humanity and Christianity are one and the same. The teaching of love for humanity has the social understanding of life at its base. Love for humanity, though it follows logically from love for the personality, has no meaning, because humanity is a fiction; Christian love, which follows from love for God, has as its object not only humanity but the whole world. Christianity teaches people to live in accordance with their divine nature. It shows that the essence of a person's soul is love, and that his good comes from his love for God, whom he is conscious of in himself as love.

Now I will speak of the other supposed understanding of Christianity, which hinders the true understanding of it — the scientific understanding.

Church people consider Christianity to be that idea of it which they have formed for themselves, and they consider this understanding of Christianity the one undoubtedly true one.

Men of science consider Christianity to be only what the various churches have professed and profess, and, supposing that these professions exhaust the whole meaning of Christianity, they recognize it as a religious teaching that has outlived its time.

In order that it be clear how impossible it is, with such a view, to understand the Christian teaching, it is necessary to form an idea of the place which religions in general, and the Christian religion in particular, have really occupied and occupy in the life of humanity, and of the significance which science ascribes to them.

As a single person cannot live without having a certain idea of the meaning of his life, and always, though often unconsciously, brings his actions into line with this meaning he gives his life, so too groups of people living in the same conditions — nations — cannot help having an idea of the meaning of their common life and of the activity that follows from it. And as a single person, entering a new age, inevitably changes his understanding of life, and a grown man sees its meaning in something other than a child does, so too a group of people, a nation, inevitably, in keeping with its age, changes its understanding of life and the activity that follows from this understanding.

The difference in this respect between a single person and all humanity is that, whereas a single person, in determining the understanding of life proper to the new period of life he is entering, and the activity following from it, makes use of the guidance of people who lived before him and have already passed through the age he is entering, humanity cannot have this guidance, because it is always moving along a path not yet explored, and there is no one to ask how life should be understood and how to act in the new conditions it is entering and in which no one has ever yet lived.

And yet, as it is impossible for a man who is married and has children to go on understanding life as he understood it when he was a child, so humanity, with the various changes that have taken place — in the density of population, in the communication established between different nations, in the improvement of the means of struggle with nature, and in the accumulation of knowledge — can no longer go on understanding life as before, but must establish a new understanding of life, from which the activity corresponding to the new state it has entered or is entering would also follow.

It is to this demand that the special ability of humanity answers: to bring forth from itself people who give a new meaning to the whole of human life — a meaning from which follows an activity wholly different from the former one. The establishment of this understanding of life, proper to humanity in the new conditions it is entering, and of the activity following from it, is what is called religion.

And therefore religion, first, is not, as science thinks, a phenomenon that once accompanied the development of humanity but was later outlived by it, but is a phenomenon always present in the life of humanity, and in our time just as inevitably present in humanity as at any other time. Second, religion is always the determination of the activity of the future, not of the past, and therefore it is obvious that the study of past phenomena can in no case grasp the essence of religion.

The essence of every religious teaching is not in a desire for symbolic expression of the forces of nature, not in fear of them, not in a need for the miraculous, and not in the outward forms of its manifestation, as men of science think. The essence of religion is in the ability of people to foresee prophetically and to point out the path of life along which humanity must go, in a new determination of the meaning of life, different from the former one, from which also follows the whole future activity of humanity, different from the former.

This ability to foresee the path along which humanity must go is common in greater or lesser degree to all people; but always, at all times, there have been people in whom this ability showed itself with special force, and these people expressed clearly and exactly what all people dimly felt, and established a new understanding of life, from which followed an activity different from the former, for many hundreds and thousands of years.

We know three such understandings of life: two already outlived by humanity, and the third, which we are now living through in Christianity. There are three such understandings, and only three, not because we have arbitrarily combined various understandings of life into these three, but because the actions of all people always have one of these three understandings of life at their base, because we cannot understand life otherwise than in these three ways.

These three understandings of life are the following: the first is the personal, or animal; the second the social, or pagan; and the third the universal, or divine.

According to the first understanding of life, a person's life consists in his personality alone; the aim of his life is in satisfying the will of this personality. According to the second understanding of life, a person's life consists not in his personality alone, but in the aggregate and succession of personalities: in the tribe, the family, the clan, the state; the aim of life consists in satisfying the will of this aggregate of personalities. According to the third understanding of life, a person's life consists neither in his own personality nor in the aggregate and succession of personalities, but in the beginning and source of life — in God.

These three understandings of life serve as the basis of all religions that have existed and exist.

The savage recognizes life only in himself, in his personal desires. The good of his life is concentrated in himself alone. The highest good for him is the fullest satisfaction of his lust. The motive force of his life is personal pleasure. His religion consists in propitiating the deity toward his personality and in worshipping imagined personalities of gods, who live only for personal aims.

The pagan, social man recognizes life no longer in himself alone, but in an aggregate of personalities — in the tribe, the family, the clan, the state — and sacrifices his personal good for these aggregates. The motive force of his life is glory. His religion consists in exalting the heads of these unions: founders of clans, ancestors, sovereigns, and in worshipping gods — the exclusive protectors of his family, his clan, his nation, his state.¹⁰

The man of the divine understanding of life recognizes life no longer in his personality and not in an aggregate of personalities (in the family, clan, nation, fatherland or state), but in the source of eternal, undying life — in God; and to fulfill the will of God he sacrifices his personal, family and social good. The motive force of his life is love. And his religion is worship in deed and in truth of the beginning of all — God.

The whole historical life of humanity is nothing other than a gradual passage from the personal, animal understanding of life to the social understanding of life, and from the social understanding of life to the divine. The whole history of the ancient nations, which lasted thousands of years and ends with the history of Rome, is the history of the replacing of the animal, personal understanding of life by the social and state understanding. The whole of history since the time of imperial Rome and the appearance of Christianity is the history, which we are living through even now, of the replacing of the state understanding of life by the divine.

It is this last understanding of life, and the Christian teaching founded on it, which guides our whole life and lies at the base of all our activity, practical as well as scientific, that the people of a supposed science, looking at it only by its outward signs, recognize as something outlived and of no significance for us.

This teaching, in the opinion of men of science, consisting only in its dogmatic side — in the teaching about the Trinity, the redemption, miracles, the church, the sacraments and so on — is only one of the enormous number of religions that have arisen in humanity, and now, having played its part in history, is outliving its time, perishing before the light of science and true enlightenment.

What happens is what in most cases serves as the source of the crudest human errors: people standing on a lower level of understanding, meeting with phenomena of a higher order — instead of making an effort to understand them, to rise to the point of view from which the subject must be looked at — judge it from their own lower point of view, and with all the more boldness and decision the less they understand what they are talking about.

For the majority of scientific people, who look at Christ's living moral teaching from the lower point of view of the social understanding of life, this teaching is only a very vague, incoherent combination of Indian asceticism, Stoic and Neoplatonic teaching, and utopian antisocial dreams having no serious significance for our time, and its whole significance is concentrated for them in its outward manifestations: in Catholicism, Protestantism, dogmas, the struggle with secular power. Defining the significance of Christianity by these phenomena, they are like deaf people who would judge the significance and worth of music by the look of the musicians' movements.

From this it comes that all these people, beginning with Comte, Strauss, Spencer and Renan, not understanding the meaning of Christ's sayings, not understanding to what and why they were said, not understanding even the question to which they are the answer, not even giving themselves the trouble to go into their meaning, straightforwardly, if they are hostile, deny the reasonableness of the teaching; and if they want to be indulgent to it, then from the height of their greatness they correct it, supposing that Christ wanted to say the very thing they think but did not manage to do so. They treat his teaching as self-assured people mostly speak, correcting the words of the person they are talking with, to someone they consider far below themselves: "Yes, what you really mean to say is this and that." This correction is always made in the sense of reducing the teaching of the higher, divine understanding of life to the lower, social one.

It is usually said that the moral teaching of Christianity is good but exaggerated — that for it to be wholly good, what is superfluous and does not suit our order of life must be cast off from it. "Otherwise a teaching that demands too much, the impossible, is worse than one that demands of people what is possible, in keeping with their strength," the learned interpreters of Christianity think and assert, repeating here what was long ago asserted, and is asserted, and could not help being asserted about the Christian teaching by those who, not having understood it, crucified the teacher for it — the Jews.

It turns out that before the judgment of the learned of our time the Jewish law — a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye — the law of just retribution, known to humanity five thousand years ago, is more expedient than the law of love, preached by Christ eighteen hundred years ago in place of this very law of justice.

It turns out that all that was done by those people who understood Christ's teaching directly and lived in accordance with such an understanding — all that all true Christians, all Christian ascetics did and said, all that is transforming the world now under the guise of socialism and communism — all this is exaggerations not worth talking about.

People brought up for eighteen centuries in Christianity have become convinced, in the persons of their advanced people, the learned, that the Christian teaching is a teaching about dogmas; while the teaching for life is a misunderstanding, an exaggeration that violates the real, lawful demands of morality corresponding to human nature, and that the very teaching of justice which Christ rejected, in whose place he put his own teaching, is far more suitable for us.

To learned people the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence seems an exaggeration and even unreasonable. If it is cast off, things will be much better, they think, not noticing that they are not discussing Christ's teaching at all, but what seems to them to be it.

They do not notice that to say that in Christ's teaching the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence is an exaggeration is the same as to say that in the theory of the circle the proposition that the radii of a circle are equal is an exaggeration. And those who say this are doing exactly the same as a man with no idea of what a circle is would be doing, who asserted that the requirement that all points of the circumference be at an equal distance from the center is an exaggeration. To advise casting off or moderating the proposition that the radii of a circle are equal means not to understand what a circle is. To advise casting off or moderating in Christ's teaching for life the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence means not to understand the teaching.

And those who do this really do not understand it at all. They do not understand that this teaching is the establishment of a new understanding of life, corresponding to the new state which people entered eighteen hundred years ago, and the determination of the new activity which follows from it. They do not believe that Christ meant to say what he said: or it seems to them that he said what he said in the Sermon on the Mount and in other places out of enthusiasm, lack of reason, or lack of development.¹¹

(Matt. VI, 25–34).

25) Therefore I say to you: do not take care for your soul, what you will eat and what you will drink, nor for your body, what you will put on. Is not the soul more than food, and the body than clothing? 26) Look at the birds of the air: they do not sow, they do not reap, they do not gather into barns; and your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much better than they? 27) And which of you by taking care can add even one cubit to his height? 28) And why do you take care about clothing? Look at the lilies of the field, how they grow: they do not toil, they do not spin. 29) But I say to you that Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of them. 30) And if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is today, and tomorrow will be thrown into the oven, how much more you, you of little faith! 31) So do not take care, and do not say: what shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we put on? 32) For the pagans seek all these things, and because your heavenly father knows that you need all these things. 33) Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all this will be added to you. 34) So do not take care for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care for its own: sufficient for each day is its own care.

(Luke XII, 33, 34).

Sell your possessions and give alms. Make yourselves purses that do not grow old, a treasure in heaven that does not fail, where no thief comes near and no moth eats; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Sell your possessions and follow me, and whoever does not leave father or mother, and children and brothers, and fields and house, cannot be my disciple.

Deny yourself, take up your cross each day and follow me. My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Not my will be done, but yours; not what I want, but what you want, and not as I want, but as you want. Life is in doing not one's own will, but the will of God.

All these propositions seem to people who stand at the lower understanding of life the expression of some ecstatic enthusiasm, having no direct application to life. And yet these propositions follow from the Christian understanding of life just as strictly as the proposition about giving one's labor for the common cause, about the sacrifice of one's life for the defense of the fatherland, follows from the social understanding of life.

As the man of the social understanding of life says to the savage: come to your senses, think again! The life of your personality cannot be true life, because this life is wretched and passing. Only the life of the aggregate and succession of personalities — tribe, family, clan, state — goes on and lives, and therefore a person must sacrifice his personality for the life of the family, the state. In exactly the same way the Christian teaching speaks to the man of the aggregate, social understanding of life. Repent — μετανοειτε, that is, think again, or you will perish. Understand that this carnal, personal life, arising today and destroyed tomorrow, can be secured by nothing, that no outward measures, no ordering of it can give it firmness or reasonableness. Think again and understand that the life you are living is not real life; the life of the family, the life of society, the life of the state will not save you from perishing. A true, reasonable life is possible for a person only in the measure in which he can be a participant not in the family or the state, but in the source of life, the father; in the measure in which he can merge his life with the life of the father. Such undoubtedly is the Christian understanding of life, visible in every saying of the Gospel.

One may not share this understanding of life, one may deny it, one may prove its inexactness and incorrectness; but it is impossible to judge a teaching without having taken in the understanding of life from which it follows; and still more impossible to judge a subject of a higher order from a lower point of view: to judge the bell tower by looking at the foundation. And it is this very thing that the scientific people of our time do. They do it because they are in an error like that of church people: that they possess such methods of studying a subject that if only these methods, called scientific, are used, there can no longer be any doubt about the truth of the understanding of the subject being discussed.

It is this possession of a supposedly infallible instrument of knowledge that serves as the chief obstacle to understanding the Christian teaching for unbelieving and so-called scientific people, by whose opinion the whole enormous majority of unbelieving, so-called educated people is guided. From this supposed understanding follow all the errors of scientific people about the Christian teaching, and in particular two strange misunderstandings which more than anything else hinder a correct understanding of it.

One of these misunderstandings is that the Christian teaching for life cannot be fulfilled, and therefore either is not binding at all, that is, should not be taken as guidance, or must be modified, moderated to the limits within which its fulfillment is possible in our society. The other misunderstanding is that the Christian teaching of love for God, and therefore of the service of him, is an unclear, mystical demand, with no definite object of love, which therefore must be replaced by the more exact and comprehensible teaching of love for people and the service of humanity.

The first misunderstanding, that the teaching cannot be fulfilled, consists in this: that people of the social understanding of life, not understanding the way in which the Christian teaching guides people, and taking the Christian pointing to perfection for rules that determine life, think and say that following Christ's teaching is impossible, because the full fulfillment of the demands of this teaching destroys life. "If a person fulfilled what Christ preaches, he would destroy his life; and if all people fulfilled it, the human race too would come to an end," they say.

"Not taking care for tomorrow — for what to eat, and what to drink, and what to put on; not defending one's life, not resisting evil by violence, giving up one's life for one's friends and keeping complete chastity, a person and the human race cannot exist," they think and say.

And they are completely right if the pointings to perfection given by Christ's teaching are taken for rules which everyone is obliged to fulfill, just as in the social teaching everyone is obliged to fulfill the rule of paying taxes, taking part in the courts and the like.

The misunderstanding consists precisely in this: that Christ's teaching guides people in a different way than the teachings founded on the lower understanding of life guide them. The teachings of the social understanding of life guide only by the demand for the exact fulfillment of rules or laws. Christ's teaching guides people by pointing them to the infinite perfection of the heavenly father, toward which it is natural for every person to strive of his own will, at whatever degree of imperfection he may be.

The misunderstanding of people who judge the Christian teaching from the point of view of the social consists in this: that they, supposing that the perfection pointed to by Christ can be fully reached, ask themselves (just as they ask themselves, supposing that social laws will be fulfilled) what will happen when all this is fulfilled? This supposition is false, because the perfection pointed out to Christians is infinite and can never be reached; and Christ gives his teaching bearing in mind that full perfection will never be reached, but that the striving toward full, infinite perfection will constantly increase the good of people, and that this good can therefore be increased to infinity.

Christ teaches not angels but people, who live an animal life and are moved by it. And to this animal force of movement Christ, as it were, applies a new, different force — the consciousness of divine perfection — and thereby directs the movement of life along the resultant of the two forces.

To suppose that human life will go in the direction pointed out by Christ is the same as supposing that a boatman crossing a swift river and directing his course almost straight against the current will travel in that direction.

Christ recognizes the existence of both sides of the parallelogram, of both eternal, indestructible forces of which a person's life is composed: the force of the animal nature and the force of the consciousness of sonship to God. Saying nothing of the animal force, which, asserting itself, always stays equal to itself and is outside a person's power, Christ speaks only of the divine force, calling a person to the greatest consciousness of it, to its greatest freeing from what holds it back, and to bringing it to the highest degree of tension.

In this freeing — the increase of this force — consists, according to Christ's teaching, the true life of a person. True life, under the former conditions, consists in fulfilling rules, the law; according to Christ's teaching it consists in the greatest approach to the divine perfection pointed out to and recognized by every person in himself, in a greater and greater approach to the merging of one's will with the will of God, a merging toward which a person strives and which would be the destruction of the life we know.

Divine perfection is the asymptote of human life, toward which it always strives and approaches, and which can be reached by it only in infinity.

The Christian teaching seems to exclude the possibility of life only when people take the pointing to an ideal for a rule. Only then do the demands that Christ's teaching makes appear to destroy life. These demands, on the contrary, alone make true life possible. Without these demands true life would be impossible.

"One cannot demand too much," people usually say, discussing the demands of the Christian teaching; "one cannot demand that people take no care at all for the future, as is said in the Gospel, but only that they not take too much care; one cannot give everything to the poor, but must give a certain, definite part; one need not strive for virginity, but must avoid debauchery; one need not leave wife and children, but must not have too great an attachment to them," and so on.

But to speak like this is the same as telling a person who is crossing a swift river and directing his course against the current that it is impossible to cross a river by heading against the current, and that to cross it one must swim in the direction one wants to go.

Christ's teaching differs from earlier teachings in that it guides people not by outward rules but by the inner consciousness that divine perfection can be reached. And in a person's soul there are not moderate rules of justice and philanthropy, but the ideal of complete, infinite, divine perfection. Only the striving toward this perfection turns the direction of a person's life from the animal state toward the divine, as far as that is possible in this life.

In order to land at the place one wants, one must direct one's course with all one's strength much higher up.

To lower the demands of the ideal means not only to diminish the possibility of perfection, but to destroy the ideal itself. The ideal that acts on people is not an ideal invented by someone, but the ideal carried in the soul of every person. Only this ideal of complete, infinite perfection acts on people and moves them to activity. Moderate perfection loses its power of acting on people's souls.

Christ's teaching has power only when it demands complete perfection, that is, the merging of the divine essence, found in the soul of every person, with the will of God — the union of the son with the father. Only this freeing of the son of God, who lives in every person, from the animal, and his approach to the father, make up life according to Christ's teaching.

The existence of the animal in a person, of the animal only, is not human life. Life according to the will of God alone is not human life either. Human life is compounded of animal life and divine life. And the more this compound approaches divine life, the more life there is.

Life according to the Christian teaching is movement toward divine perfection. No state, according to this teaching, can be higher or lower than another. Every state, according to this teaching, is only a certain step, in itself indifferent, toward an unattainable perfection, and therefore in itself makes up neither a greater nor a lesser degree of life. The increase of life, according to this teaching, is only the quickening of the movement toward perfection. And therefore the movement toward perfection of the publican Zacchaeus, of the harlot, of the thief on the cross, makes up a higher degree of life than the motionless righteousness of the Pharisee. And for that reason there can be no rules for this teaching that are binding to fulfill. A person standing on a lower step, moving toward perfection, lives more morally, better, fulfills the teaching more, than a person standing on a much higher step of morality but not moving toward perfection.

It is in this sense that the strayed sheep is dearer to the father than those that did not stray. The prodigal son, the coin lost and found again, are dearer than those that were not lost.

The fulfillment of the teaching is in movement from oneself toward God. It is obvious that for such a fulfillment of the teaching there can be no definite laws and rules. Every degree of perfection and every degree of imperfection are equal before this teaching; no fulfillment of laws makes up the fulfillment of the teaching; and therefore for this teaching there are not and cannot be binding rules and laws.

From this fundamental difference between Christ's teaching and all the preceding teachings founded on the social understanding of life comes also the difference between the social commandments and the Christian commandments. The social commandments are for the most part positive, prescribing certain acts, justifying people, giving them righteousness. But the Christian commandments (the commandment of love is not a commandment in the narrow sense of the word, but the expression of the very essence of the teaching), the five commandments of the Sermon on the Mount, are all negative and show only what, at a certain level of the development of humanity, people can already not do. These commandments are, as it were, marks on the infinite path of perfection along which humanity is going — marks of the degree of perfection that is possible in a certain period of the development of humanity.

In the Sermon on the Mount Christ expressed both the eternal ideal toward which it is natural for people to strive, and the degree of its attainment which can already be reached by people in our time.

The ideal consists in bearing ill will toward no one, arousing no hostility in anyone, loving everyone; and the commandment, pointing out the level below which it is fully possible not to fall in reaching this ideal, consists in not insulting people with words. And this makes up the first commandment.

The ideal is complete chastity even in thought; the commandment, pointing out the level of attainment below which it is fully possible not to fall in reaching this ideal, is purity of married life, abstinence from fornication. And this makes up the second commandment.

The ideal is to take no care for the future, to live in the present hour; the commandment, pointing out the level of attainment below which it is fully possible not to fall, is not to swear, not to promise anything to people in advance. And this is the third commandment.

The ideal is never, for any aim, to use violence; the commandment, pointing out the level below which it is fully possible not to fall, is not to repay evil with evil, to bear insults, to give up one's shirt. And this is the fourth commandment.

The ideal is to love enemies who hate us; the commandment, pointing out the level of attainment below which it is fully possible not to fall, is not to do evil to enemies, to speak well of them, to make no distinction between them and one's fellow citizens.

All these commandments are indications of what, on the path of striving toward perfection, we are fully able already not to do — of what we must work on now, of what we must little by little carry over into the realm of habit, into the realm of the unconscious. But these commandments not only do not make up the teaching and do not exhaust it, but make up only one of its countless steps in the approach to perfection.

These commandments must and will be followed by higher and higher ones on the path of perfection pointed out by the teaching.

And therefore it is proper to the Christian teaching to put forward demands higher than those expressed in these commandments; but in no way to lessen the demands either of the ideal itself or of these commandments, as people do who judge the teaching of Christianity from the point of view of the social understanding of life.

Such is one misunderstanding of scientific people concerning the significance and meaning of Christ's teaching; the other, which follows from the same source, consists in replacing the Christian demand of love for God and service of him by love and service of people — humanity.

The Christian teaching of love for God and service of him, and (only as a consequence of this love and service) of love and service of one's neighbor, seems to scientific people unclear, mystical and arbitrary, and they exclude completely the demand of love and service of God, supposing that the teaching about this love for people, for humanity, is much more comprehensible, firmer and better founded.

Scientific people teach in theory that a meaningful and good life is only a life of service of all humanity, and in this very teaching they see the meaning of the Christian teaching; to this teaching they reduce the Christian teaching; for this teaching of theirs they look for confirmation in the Christian teaching, supposing that their teaching and the Christian one are one and the same.

This opinion is completely mistaken. The Christian teaching and the teaching of the positivists, the communists and all the preachers of the universal brotherhood of people founded on the profitableness of this brotherhood have nothing in common with each other, and differ from each other especially in this: that the Christian teaching has firm, clear foundations in the human soul, while the teaching of love for humanity is only a theoretical conclusion by analogy.

The teaching of love for humanity alone has the social understanding of life at its base.

The essence of the social understanding of life consists in carrying the meaning of one's personal life over into the life of an aggregate of personalities: the tribe, the family, the clan, the state. This carrying over took place and takes place easily and naturally in its first forms, in carrying the meaning of life over from one's personality into the tribe, the family. Carrying it over into the clan or the nation is already harder and requires special education for it; and carrying consciousness over into the state is already the limit of such carrying over.

To love oneself is natural to everyone, and everyone loves himself without encouragement to do so; to love one's tribe, which supports and protects me, to love one's wife — the joy and help of life — one's children — the comfort and hope of life — and one's parents, who gave life and upbringing, is natural; and this love, though far from as strong as love for oneself, is met with fairly often.

To love one's clan, one's nation, for oneself, for one's pride, though no longer so natural, is still met with. Love for one's nation of the same tribe, the same language, the same faith is still possible, though this feeling is far from as strong, not only as love for oneself, but even as love for the family or clan; but love for a state such as Turkey, Germany, England, Austria, Russia is already an almost impossible thing, and in spite of intensified education in this direction, is only supposed and does not exist in reality. With this aggregate the possibility ends for a person to carry over his consciousness and to feel any direct feeling for this fiction. But the positivists and all the preachers of scientific brotherhood, not taking into account the weakening of feeling as the object widens, reason theoretically further in the same direction. "If," they say, "it was more profitable for the personality to carry its consciousness over into the tribe, the family, and then into the nation, the state, it will be still more profitable to carry its consciousness over into the aggregate of all humanity, and for all to live for humanity, just as people live for the family, for the state."

Theoretically it does indeed come out so.

Carrying the consciousness and love of the personality over into the family, from the family into the clan, the nation, the state, it would be wholly logical for people too, to rid themselves of the struggle and calamities that come from the division of humanity into nations and states, most naturally to carry their love over to humanity. This would seem most logical, and theoretically they preach it, not noticing that love is a feeling which one can have but which cannot be preached, and that besides, love must have an object, and humanity is not an object but only a fiction.

The tribe, the family, even the state were not invented by people but formed by themselves, like a swarm of bees, of ants, and really exist. A person who loves his family for the sake of his animal personality knows whom he loves: Anna, Marya, Ivan, Pyotr and so on. A person who loves his clan and is proud of it knows that he loves all the Guelphs or all the Ghibellines; one who loves the state knows that he loves France up to the bank of the Rhine, and the Pyrenees, and its chief city Paris, and its history and so on. But what does a person who loves humanity love? There is the state, the nation; there is the abstract concept: man; but humanity, as a real concept, there is not and cannot be.

Humanity? Where is the limit of humanity? Where does it end or begin? Does humanity end with the savage, the idiot, the alcoholic, the madman inclusive? If we draw a line dividing off humanity so as to exclude the lower representatives of the human race, then where shall we draw the line? Shall we exclude the Negroes, as the Americans exclude them, and the Indians, as some Englishmen exclude them, and the Jews, as some exclude them? And if we take in all people without exception, then why shall we take in only people, and not the higher animals, many of which are higher than the lower representatives of the human race?

We do not know humanity as an outward object, we do not know its limits. Humanity is a fiction, and it cannot be loved. Indeed, it would be very profitable if people could love humanity as they love the family; it would be very profitable, as the communists argue, to replace the competitive direction of human activity by a communal one, or the individual by the universal, so that each is for all and all for one — only there are no motives for this. The positivists, the communists and all the preachers of scientific brotherhood preach widening the love which people have for themselves and for their families and for the state to all humanity, forgetting that the love they preach is a personal love, which could, thinning out, spread to the family; thinning out still more, spread to the natural fatherland; which disappears completely on touching an artificial state such as Austria, England, Turkey; and which we cannot even imagine when it concerns all humanity, a wholly mystical object.

"A person loves himself (his animal life), loves his family, loves even his fatherland. Why should he not love humanity as well? How good that would be. And, by the way, Christianity preaches this very thing." So think the preachers of positive, communist, socialist brotherhood. Indeed it would be very good, but it can in no way be, because a love founded on the personal and social understanding of life cannot go further than love for the state.

The error of the argument is that the social understanding of life, on which love for the family and for the fatherland is founded, rests on love for the personality, and that this love, carried over from the personality to the family, the clan, the nationality, the state, grows weaker and weaker, and in the state reaches its last limit, beyond which it cannot go.

The necessity of widening the sphere of love is beyond doubt; but at the same time this very necessity of widening it in reality destroys the possibility of love, and proves the insufficiency of personal, human love.

And it is right here that the preachers of positivist, communist, social brotherhood, to help this human love which has proved insufficient, offer Christian love — but only in its consequences, not in its foundations: they offer love for humanity alone, without love for God.

But such a love cannot be. There is no motive for it. Christian love follows only from the Christian understanding of life, according to which the meaning of life consists in love and service of God.

By a natural course, from love for oneself, then for the family, the clan, the nation, the state, the social understanding of life led people to the consciousness of the necessity of love for humanity, which has no limits and merges with everything that exists — for something that arouses no feeling in a person; it led to a contradiction which cannot be resolved by the social understanding of life.

Only the Christian teaching in its whole significance, giving a new meaning to life, resolves it. Christianity recognizes love for oneself, and for the family, and for the nation, and for humanity — not only for humanity, but for everything living, for everything that exists — and recognizes the necessity of an infinite widening of the sphere of love; but it finds the object of this love not outside itself, not in an aggregate of personalities — in the family, clan, state, humanity, in the whole outward world — but in oneself, in one's own personality, but a divine personality, whose essence is that very love to the need of widening which the animal personality had been brought, fleeing from the consciousness of its own perishability.

The difference between the Christian teaching and the earlier ones is that the earlier, social teaching said: live contrary to your nature (meaning the animal nature alone), subject it to the outward law of the family, society, the state; Christianity says: live in accordance with your nature (meaning the divine nature), subjecting it to nothing — neither to your own nor to another's animal nature — and you will reach the very thing you are striving for when you subject your outward nature to outward laws.

The Christian teaching returns a person to the original consciousness of himself — only not of himself as an animal, but of himself as God, as a spark of God, of himself as a son of God, a God just like the father, but enclosed in an animal shell. And the consciousness of oneself as this son of God, whose chief property is love, satisfies also all the demands for widening the sphere of love to which the person of the social understanding of life had been brought. Thus, with the ever greater widening of the sphere of love for the saving of the personality, love was a necessity and was fixed to certain objects: oneself, the family, society, humanity; with the Christian world view love is not a necessity and is not fixed to anything, but is an essential property of a person's soul. A person loves not because it is profitable for him to love this one and those, but because love is the essence of his soul, because he cannot help loving.

The Christian teaching is the pointing out to a person that the essence of his soul is love, that his good comes not from his loving this one and that one, but from his loving the beginning of all — God, whom he is conscious of in himself as love — and therefore loving everyone and everything.

In this consists the fundamental difference between the Christian teaching and the teaching of the positivists and of all the theorists of a non-Christian universal brotherhood.

Such are the two chief misunderstandings concerning the Christian teaching, from which the majority of false judgments about it follow. One — that Christ's teaching instructs people, like the earlier teachings, in rules which people are obliged to follow, and that these rules cannot be fulfilled; the other — that the whole significance of Christianity consists in the teaching about the profitable living together of humanity as one family, for which, without mentioning love for God, one need only follow the rule of love for humanity.

The false opinion of scientific people that the teaching about the supernatural makes up the essence of the Christian teaching and that its teaching for life cannot be applied, together with the misunderstanding that follows from this false opinion, makes up the other cause of the incomprehension of Christianity by the people of our time.

V

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF OUR LIFE WITH OUR CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS

People consider that one can accept Christianity without changing one's life. The pagan understanding of life no longer corresponds to the age humanity is in, which only the Christian understanding of life can satisfy. The Christian understanding of life is not yet understood by people, but life itself is leading to the necessity of accepting it. The demands of a new understanding of life always seem incomprehensible, mystical and supernatural. Such, for the majority of people, are the demands of the Christian understanding of life too. The taking in of the Christian understanding of life will inevitably be accomplished as a consequence of both material and spiritual causes. Because people, knowing the demands of the higher understanding of life, go on holding to lower forms of life, contradictions and sufferings arise which poison life and demand that it be changed. The contradictions of our life. The economic contradiction and the sufferings that follow from it, both for working people and for the rich. The state contradiction and the sufferings that follow from obedience to the laws of the state. The international contradiction and the consciousness of it among contemporaries: Komarovsky, Ferri, Booth, Passy, Lawson, Wilson, Bartlett, Defourny, Moneta. The sharpness of the military contradiction.

There are many causes of the incomprehension of Christ's teaching. One cause is that people suppose they have understood this teaching when they have decided, as churchmen do, that it was handed down to them in a supernatural way; or, as scientific people do, that they have understood it when they have studied a part of the outward phenomena in which it has expressed itself. The cause of incomprehension lies also in the misunderstandings that the teaching cannot be fulfilled and that it must be replaced by the teaching of love for humanity; but the chief cause, which gave birth to all these misunderstandings, is that Christ's teaching is considered a teaching which one can accept or not accept without changing one's life.

People who are used to the existing order of things, who love it and are afraid to change it, try to understand the teaching as a collection of revelations and rules which can be accepted without changing one's life, whereas Christ's teaching is not only a teaching about rules a person must follow, but the making clear of a new meaning of life, which determines the whole activity of humanity, quite different from the former one, in the period it is entering.

Human life moves, passes through ages, like the life of a single person, and each age has an understanding of life corresponding to it, and this understanding of life is inevitably taken in by people. Those people who do not take in consciously the understanding of life corresponding to the age are brought to it unconsciously. What happens with the change of views on life of single people, the same happens with the change of views on life of nations and of all humanity. If a man with a family goes on being guided in his activity by a childish understanding of life, his life will become so hard for him that he will involuntarily seek a different understanding of life and will gladly take in the one proper to his age.

The same thing is happening now in our humanity in the passage we are living through from the pagan understanding of life to the Christian. The social man of our time is being brought by life itself to the necessity of renouncing the pagan understanding of life, which is not proper to the present age of humanity, and of submitting to the demands of the Christian teaching, whose truths, however distorted and reinterpreted, are nonetheless known to him and alone offer the resolution of the contradictions in which he is entangled.

If the demands of the Christian teaching seem strange and even dangerous to a person of the social understanding of life, then the demands of the social teaching seemed just as strange, incomprehensible and dangerous to the savage in ancient times, when he did not yet fully understand them and could not foresee their consequences.

"It is unreasonable," says the savage, "to sacrifice one's peace or life to defend something incomprehensible and intangible, conventional: the family, the clan, the fatherland; and above all it is dangerous to put oneself at the disposal of an alien power." But the time came for the savage when, on the one hand, he understood, though dimly, the significance of social life, the significance of its chief motive force, social approval or condemnation — glory; and on the other, when the sufferings of his personal life became so great that he could no longer go on believing in the truth of his former understanding of life, and he accepted the social, state teaching and submitted to it.

Exactly the same is now taking place with the social, state man.

"It is unreasonable," says the social man, "to sacrifice my own good, that of my family, of my fatherland, to fulfill the demands of some higher law that requires of me renunciation of the most natural and good feelings of love for myself, for my family, for my homeland, for my fatherland; and above all it is dangerous to reject the security of life given by the order of the state."

But the time comes when, on the one hand, the dim consciousness in his soul of the higher law of love for God and neighbor, and on the other, the sufferings that follow from the contradictions of life, compel a person to renounce the social understanding of life and to take in the new one offered him, which resolves all the contradictions and removes the sufferings of his life — the Christian understanding of life. And this time has now come.

To us, who thousands of years ago already lived through the passage from the animal, personal understanding of life to the social understanding of life, it seems that that passage was necessary and natural, and this one — the one we are living through now, these last eighteen hundred years — both arbitrary and unnatural and frightening. But this only seems so to us, because that passage is already accomplished and its activity has already become unconscious; the present passage is not yet finished, and we must accomplish it consciously.

The social understanding of life entered people's consciousness over centuries, over thousands of years, passed through various forms, and has now risen for humanity into the realm of the unconscious, handed down by heredity, upbringing and habit; and therefore it seems natural to us. But five thousand years ago it seemed to people just as unnatural and frightening as the Christian teaching in its real meaning seems to them now.

It seems to us now that the demands of the Christian teaching about universal brotherhood, about the indifference of nationalities, about the absence of property, about the non-resistance to evil by violence that seems so strange, are demands for the impossible. But exactly so, thousands of years ago, in more ancient times, seemed the demands not only of the state but of the family, such as, for example, the demand that parents feed their children, the young the old, that spouses be faithful to each other. Still stranger, even mad, seemed the demands of the state: that citizens submit to the authority set over them, pay taxes, go to war for the defense of the fatherland and so on. It seems to us now that all such demands are simple, comprehensible, natural, and have nothing mystical or even strange in them; but five or three thousand years ago these demands seemed demands for the impossible.

The social understanding of life served as the basis of religions precisely because at the time when it was put before people it seemed to them wholly incomprehensible, mystical and supernatural. Now, having lived through this phase of the life of humanity, we understand the reasonable causes of people's joining together in families, communities, states; but in antiquity the demands of such joining were put forward in the name of the supernatural and confirmed by it.

The patriarchal religions deified families, clans, nations; the state religions deified kings and states. Even now the majority of little-educated people, like our peasants, who call the tsar an earthly god, submit to social laws not from a reasonable consciousness of their necessity, not because they have a notion of the idea of the state, but from religious feeling.

In exactly the same way the Christian teaching now presents itself to people of the social or pagan world view in the form of a supernatural religion, whereas in reality there is nothing mysterious in it, nothing mystical, nothing supernatural; it is only a teaching about life corresponding to the level of material development, to the age in which humanity finds itself, and which therefore must inevitably be accepted by it.

The time will come, and is already coming, when the Christian foundations of life — the equality and brotherhood of people, community of goods, non-resistance to evil by violence — will become just as natural and simple as the foundations of family, social and state life seem to us now.

Neither a person nor humanity can go backward in its movement. The social, family and state understanding of life has been lived through by people, and they must go forward and take in the next, higher understanding of life, which is what is taking place now.

This movement takes place from two sides: both consciously, as a consequence of spiritual causes, and unconsciously, as a consequence of material causes.

As a single person very rarely changes his life only at the pointing of reason, but for the most part, in spite of the new meaning and new aims pointed out by reason, goes on living his former life and changes it only when his life becomes wholly contrary to his consciousness and in consequence tormenting, in exactly the same way humanity, having learned through its religious guides a new meaning of life, new aims toward which it must strive, for a long time even after this knowledge goes on, in the majority of people, living its former life, and is brought to accept the new understanding of life only by the consciousness that the former life cannot go on.

In spite of the demands for a change of life, recognized and expressed by the religious guides and accepted by the most reasonable people, the majority of people, in spite of their religious attitude toward these guides, that is, faith in their teaching, go on in a life that has become more complicated being guided by the former teaching, as a family man would act if, knowing how one ought to live at his age, he went on from habit and lightness of mind living a childish life.

This is just what is happening in the passage of humanity from one age to another which we are living through now. Humanity has grown out of its social, state age and has entered a new one. It knows the teaching that must be laid at the foundation of the life of this new age, but from inertia it goes on holding to the former forms of life. From this lack of correspondence between the understanding of life and the practice of life follow a series of contradictions and sufferings which poison our life and demand that it be changed.

One need only compare the practice of life with its theory to be horrified at the glaring contradiction between the conditions of life and our consciousness in which we live.

Our whole life is a continuous contradiction of everything we know and consider necessary and right. This contradiction is in everything: in economic, in state and in international life. As though forgetting what we know, and putting aside for a time what we believe (we cannot help believing, because these are our only foundations of life), we do everything the wrong way round from what our conscience and our common sense demand of us.

We are guided in economic, state and international relations by those foundations which were fit for people three and five thousand years ago, and which directly contradict both our present consciousness and the conditions of life in which we now find ourselves.

It was well for the person of antiquity to live amid the division of people into slaves and masters, when he believed that this division was from God and could not be otherwise. But is such a division possible in our time?

The person of the ancient world could consider himself entitled to use the goods of this world to the harm of other people, making them suffer for generations, because he believed that people are born of different breeds, of black and white bone, of the offspring of Japheth and of Ham. The greatest sages of the world, the teachers of humanity, Plato, Aristotle, not only justified the existence of slaves and proved its lawfulness, but even three centuries ago people who wrote about an imagined society of the future, a utopia, could not imagine it without slaves.

People of antiquity and even of the Middle Ages believed, truly believed, that people are not equal, that the real people are only the Persians, only the Greeks, only the Romans, only the French; but we can no longer believe this. And those people who in our time go to great lengths for aristocratism and for patriotism do not believe, cannot believe, what they say.

We all know and cannot help knowing — even if we had never heard or read this thought clearly expressed and had never expressed it ourselves — we, having drunk in this consciousness that is carried in the Christian air, all of us know with all our heart and cannot help knowing that fundamental truth of the Christian teaching: that we are all sons of one father, all of us, wherever we live and whatever language we speak — all brothers, and subject only to the one law of love, put into our hearts by our common father.

Whatever the way of thinking and the degree of education of a person of our time — be he an educated liberal of whatever shade, be he a philosopher of whatever persuasion, be he a scientific person, an economist of whatever school, be he an uneducated, even a religious person of whatever confession — every person of our time knows that people all have equal rights to life and to the goods of the world, that some people are no better and no worse than others, that all people are equal. Everyone knows this undoubtedly and firmly with his whole being, and at the same time he not only sees around him the division of all people into two castes — one laboring, oppressed, in need and suffering, the other idle, oppressing, living in luxury and making merry — he not only sees it, but willy-nilly takes part, from one side or the other, in this division of people which his consciousness rejects, and cannot help suffering from the consciousness of such a contradiction and of his part in it.

Whether he be master or slave, the person of our time cannot help experiencing the constant, tormenting contradiction between consciousness and reality, and the sufferings that follow from it.

The working mass, the great majority of people, suffering from constant, senseless, unrelieved labor and privations that swallow up their whole life, suffer most of all from the consciousness of the glaring contradiction between what is and what ought to be according to everything professed by themselves and by those who have put them in this position and keep them in it.

They know that they are in slavery and perish in want and darkness in order to serve the lusts of the minority that keeps them in slavery. They know it and say it. And this consciousness not only increases their suffering but makes up its essence.

The ancient slave knew that he was a slave by nature, but our worker, feeling himself a slave, knows that he need not be a slave, and therefore suffers the torments of Tantalus, forever wanting and not receiving what not only could but ought to be. The sufferings of the working classes, which come from the contradiction between what is and what ought to be, are increased tenfold by the envy and hatred that follow from this consciousness.

The worker of our time, even if his work were much lighter than the work of the ancient slave, even if he won an eight-hour day and a wage of three dollars a day, will not stop suffering, because, making things he will not use, working not for himself of his own will but from need, for the whims of luxurious and idle people in general and, in particular, for the profit of one rich man, the owner of a factory or works, he knows that all this is happening in a world in which not only is the scientific proposition recognized that only labor is wealth, that using the labor of others is injustice, unlawfulness, punished by the laws, but in a world in which Christ's teaching is professed, according to which we are all brothers, and a person's worth and merit lie only in serving his neighbor, not in using him.

He knows all this, and cannot help suffering torment from this glaring contradiction between everything that ought to be and what is. "By all the evidence and by everything I know that everyone professes," the working man says to himself, "I ought to be free, equal to all other people, loved; and I am a slave, I am humiliated and hated." And he himself hates, and looks for means to save himself from his position, to throw off the enemy who has fallen on him and to sit on him himself. People say: "The workers are wrong in wanting to sit in the place of the capitalists, the poor in the place of the rich." That is not true: the workers and the poor would be wrong if they wanted this in a world in which slaves and masters, rich and poor are recognized as established by God; but they want it in a world in which the teaching of the Gospel is professed, whose first proposition is the sonship of people to God and therefore the brotherhood and equality of all people. And however people try, it cannot be hidden that one of the first conditions of Christian life is love not in words but in deed.

In still greater contradiction and suffering lives the person of the so-called educated class. Every such person, if he believes in anything, believes, if not in the brotherhood of people, then in humaneness; if not in humaneness, then in justice; if not in justice, then in science; and at the same time knows that his whole life is built on conditions directly opposed to all this, to all the propositions of Christianity, and humaneness, and justice, and science.

He knows that all the habits in which he was brought up, to be deprived of which would be torment for him, can all be satisfied only by the tormenting, often ruinous labor of oppressed workers, that is, by the most obvious, crude violation of those principles of Christianity, humaneness, justice, even of science (I mean the demands of political economy) which he professes. He professes the principles of brotherhood, humaneness, justice, science, and not only lives in such a way that he needs that oppression of the workers which he condemns, but in such a way that his whole life is a using of this oppression; and not only lives so, but directs his activity to maintaining this order of things, directly opposed to everything he believes in.

We are all brothers, and yet every morning a brother or sister carries out my chamber pot. We are all brothers, and in the morning I need a cigar, sugar, a mirror and such things, in the making of which my brothers and sisters, my equals, have lost and are losing their health, and I use these things and even demand them. We are all brothers, and I live by working in a bank or a trading house or a shop at making all the goods my brothers need dearer. We are all brothers, and I live by receiving a salary for exposing, trying and punishing the thief or the prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole make of my life, and whom I myself know should not be punished but set right. We are all brothers, but I live by receiving a salary for collecting taxes from poor workers to be spent on the luxury of the idle and rich. We are all brothers, and I receive a salary for preaching to people a supposedly Christian faith in which I myself do not believe, and which deprives them of the possibility of learning the true one. I receive a salary as a priest, a bishop, for deceiving people in the matter most important to them. We are all brothers, but I give the poor my pedagogical, medical, literary labors only for money. We are all brothers, and I receive a salary for preparing myself for murder, learning to kill, or making weapons, powder, fortresses.

The whole life of our upper classes is a continuous contradiction, the more tormenting the more sensitive a person's moral consciousness.

A person with a sensitive conscience cannot help suffering if he lives this life. The one means for him to rid himself of this suffering is to stifle his conscience; but even if such people manage to stifle their conscience, they cannot stifle fear.

The insensitive people of the upper, oppressing classes, who have stifled their conscience, if they do not suffer from conscience, suffer from fear and hatred. And they cannot help suffering. They know about the hatred toward them which lives, and cannot help living, in the working classes; they know that the workers know that they are deceived and violated, and are beginning to organize in order to throw off oppression and pay back the oppressors. The upper classes see the unions, the strikes, the first of May, and sense the trouble that threatens them, and this fear poisons their life. They sense the trouble that threatens them, and the fear they feel passes into a feeling of self-defense and into hatred. They know that if for a moment they weaken in the struggle with the slaves they oppress, they themselves will perish, because the slaves are embittered, and this bitterness grows with each day of oppression. The oppressors, even if they wished it, cannot stop oppressing. They know that they themselves will perish as soon as they not only stop, but weaken in their oppression. And they go on doing it, in spite of supposed concern for the well-being of the worker, for the eight-hour day, for prohibiting the work of children and women, for pensions and compensation. All this is deception, or concern that the slave should not lose the strength to work; but the slave remains a slave, and the master, who cannot live without a slave, is less ready than ever to free him.

The ruling classes, in relation to the workers, are in the position of a man who has thrown his opponent under him and holds him down without letting him go, not so much because he does not want to let him go as because he knows that he need only let the man under him go for a moment to have his own throat cut at once, because the man under him is embittered and has a knife in his hand. And therefore, whether they are sensitive or insensitive, our rich classes cannot enjoy the goods they have stolen from the poor, as the ancients did, who believed in their right. Their whole life and all their pleasures are poisoned by reproaches of conscience or by fear.

Such is the economic contradiction. Still more striking is the state contradiction.

All people are brought up first of all in habits of obedience to the laws of the state. The whole life of people of our time is determined by the law of the state. A person marries and divorces, brings up children, even professes a faith (in many states) in accordance with the law. What then is this law that determines the whole life of people? Do people believe in this law? Do they consider it true? Not at all. In most cases people of our time do not believe in the justice of this law, despise it, and yet obey it. It was well for the people of antiquity to carry out their laws. They believed, truly believed, that their law (which was for the most part a religious one) was the only true law, to which all people must submit. But we? We know and cannot help knowing that the law of our state not only is not the one eternal law, but is only one of the many laws of different states, all equally imperfect, and often plainly false and unjust, discussed from every side in the newspapers. It was well for the Jew to submit to his laws when he did not doubt that God had written them with his finger; or for the Roman when he thought that the nymph Egeria had written them; or even when people believed that the kings who gave the laws were the anointed of God; or even that legislative assemblies had both the wish and the ability to find the best laws. But we know how laws are made; we have all been behind the scenes; we all know that laws are the products of self-interest, deception, the struggle of parties — that there is not and cannot be true justice in them. And therefore people of our time cannot believe that obedience to civil or state laws satisfies the demands of the reasonableness of human nature. People have long known that it is unreasonable to obey a law whose truth may be doubted, and therefore cannot help suffering when they obey a law whose reasonableness and binding force they do not recognize.

A person cannot help suffering when his whole life is determined in advance by laws which he must obey under threat of punishment, and in whose reasonableness and justice he not only does not believe, but whose injustice, cruelty and unnaturalness he often clearly recognizes. We recognize customs houses and import duties as unnecessary, and must pay them; we recognize as useless the expenses of maintaining the court and many ranks of officials; we recognize church preaching as harmful, and must take part in maintaining these institutions; we recognize the punishments imposed by the courts as cruel and shameless, and must take part in them; we recognize the distribution of landed property as wrong and harmful, and must submit to it; we do not recognize the necessity of armies and war, and must bear terrible burdens for the maintenance of armies and the waging of wars, and so on.

But even this contradiction is nothing in comparison with the contradiction which has now risen up before people in international relations and which, under threat of the destruction both of human reason and of human life, demands resolution. This is the contradiction between the Christian consciousness and war.

We, all the Christian nations, living one spiritual life, so that every good and fruitful thought that arises at one end of the world, being at once communicated to all Christian humanity, arouses the same feelings of joy and pride regardless of nationality; we who love not only the thinkers, benefactors, poets and scientists of foreign nations; we who are proud of the deed of Damien as of our own; we who simply love people of foreign nationalities — the French, the Germans, the Americans, the English; we who not only respect their qualities but rejoice when we meet them, smile at them joyfully, who not only cannot consider war with these people a heroic deed, but cannot think without horror that such a disagreement could arise between these people and us as would have to be resolved by mutual murder — we are all called to take part in a murder which must inevitably take place, if not today then tomorrow.

It was well for the Jew, the Greek, the Roman not only to defend the independence of his nation by murder, but also by murder to subject other nations to himself, when he firmly believed that his nation was the only real, good, kind nation, loved by God, and all the rest were Philistines, barbarians. People of the Middle Ages could still believe this; they could still believe it lately, at the end of the last century and at the very beginning of this one. But we, however much we are provoked, can no longer believe this, and this contradiction is so terrible for people of our time that to live without resolving it has become impossible.

"We live in a time full of contradictions," writes the professor of international law Count Komarovsky in his learned treatise. "In the press of all countries the universal striving for peace, for its necessity for all nations, is constantly put forward. Representatives of governments and private persons speak in the same sense, both as official organs, in parliamentary speeches, in diplomatic negotiations and even in mutual treaties. At the same time, however, governments raise the military force of the country every year, impose new taxes, take loans, and leave to future generations as a legacy the obligation to bear the mistakes of the present unreasonable policy. What a crying contradiction between words and deeds!

"Of course, to justify these measures governments point to the exclusively defensive character of all these expenses and armaments, but it still remains incomprehensible to any disinterested person from where an attack can be expected, when all the great powers unanimously pursue in their policy the single aim of defense. In reality it looks as though each of the powers expects every minute to be attacked by the others, and the consequences of this are the following: universal mistrust and a supernatural straining of governments to surpass the strength of other powers. Such rivalry in itself increases the danger of war: nations cannot bear increased armament for long and sooner or later will prefer war to all the disadvantages of the present position and the constant threat. So that the slightest pretext will be enough for the fire of a general war to blaze up in all Europe. It is wrong to think that such a crisis can cure us of the crushing political and economic calamities. The experience of the wars waged in recent years teaches us that each war only sharpened the hostility of nations, increased the weight and unbearableness of the pressure of militarism, and made the political and economic position of Europe only sadder and more tangled."

"Modern Europe keeps under arms an active army of 9 million men," writes Enrico Ferri, "and in addition 15 million of reserve army, spending 4 billion francs a year on this. Arming itself more and more, it paralyzes the sources of social and individual well-being, and may easily be likened to a man who, in order to provide himself with weapons, condemns himself to anemia, losing at the same time the very strength to use the weapons he provides, and under whose burden he at last falls."

Charles Booth says the same in his paper read in London to the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations on July 26, 1887. Having pointed to the same figures of 9 million and more of the active army and 17 million of the reserve, and the enormous expenses of governments on maintaining these armies and armaments, he says: "These figures represent only a small part of the real cost, because, besides these known expenses of the military budget of nations, we must take into consideration also the enormous losses of society from the withdrawal from it of such a huge number of the strongest men, lost to industry and all labor, and also the enormous interest on the sums spent on military preparations and bringing in nothing. The inevitable consequence of these expenses on war and preparations for war is the constantly increasing state debts. The greater part of the state debts of Europe was made for war. Their total sum is 4 billion pounds, or 40 billion rubles, and these debts grow every year."

The same Komarovsky says in another place: "We live in a hard time. Everywhere complaints are heard of the stagnation of trade and industry and of the bad economic situation in general; people point to the hard conditions of life of the working classes and to the general impoverishment of the masses. But in spite of this, governments go to the extreme limits of unreason in their striving to maintain their independence. Everywhere new taxes and duties are invented, and the financial oppression of the nations knows no limits. If we look at the budgets of the European states for the last hundred years, what will strike us first of all is their constantly progressive and rapid growth. How can we explain this extraordinary phenomenon, which sooner or later threatens us all with inevitable bankruptcy?

"It comes beyond dispute from the expenses caused by the maintenance of armies, which swallow a third and even a half of the budgets of all the European states. The saddest thing in this is that no end is foreseen to this growth of budgets and impoverishment of the masses. What is socialism but a protest against this extremely abnormal position in which the greater part of the population of our part of the world finds itself?"

"We are ruining ourselves," says Frédéric Passy in a paper read at the last congress (1890) of universal peace in London, "we are ruining ourselves in order to be able to take part in the mad slaughters of the future, or in order to pay the interest on the debts left to us by the mad and criminal slaughters of the past. We are dying of hunger in order to be able to kill."

Further, speaking of how France looks at this subject, he says: "We believe that a hundred years after the proclamation of the rights of man and of the citizen, the time has come to recognize the rights of nations and to renounce once and for all all these enterprises of deception and violence which, under the name of conquests, are true crimes against humanity, and which, whatever the ambition of monarchs and the pride of nations may think of them, weaken even those who triumph."

"I am surprised at the religious education in our country," says Sir Wilfrid Lawson at the same congress. "A boy goes to Sunday school, and he is taught: dear boy, you must love your enemies. If a companion strikes you, you must not repay him, but try to set him right by love. Good. The boy goes to Sunday school until 14 or 15, and then his friends put him into military service. What will he do in military service? Not love the enemy, but on the contrary, if he can only get at him, run him through with a bayonet. Such is the whole religious teaching in this country. I do not think this is the best way of fulfilling the precepts of religion. I think that if it is good for a boy to love his enemy, it is also good for a grown man."

Further: "In Europe there are 28,000,000 armed men to resolve disputes, instead of by discussion, by killing one another. Such is the method of resolving disputes accepted by the Christian nations. This method is at the same time very expensive, because by a calculation I have read, the nations of Europe since 1872 have spent an incredible sum, 15 billion rubles, on preparing for and resolving disputes by means of killing one another. It therefore seems to me that with such an order of things one of two propositions must be accepted: either that Christianity has not succeeded (is a failure), or that those who undertook to interpret it have interpreted it badly."

"Until our ironclads are disarmed and our army disbanded, we have no right to call ourselves a Christian nation," says Mr. F. Jowet Wilson.

In a discussion that arose over the question whether Christian pastors are obliged to preach against war, Mr. G. D. Bartlett said, among other things: "If I understand the Scriptures at all," he said, "I assert that people are only playing with Christianity if they ignore, that is, keep silent about, the question of war. And yet I have lived a long life and have heard a sermon on universal peace from our pastors hardly half a dozen times. Twenty years ago, in a drawing room before forty people, I said that war is incompatible with Christianity; they looked at me as at a crazy fanatic. The thought that it is possible to live without war was taken as unpardonable weakness and madness."

In the same spirit the Catholic priest L'abbé Defourny expressed himself. "One of the first precepts of the eternal law written in the conscience of all people," says the Abbé Defourny, "is the prohibition of taking the life of one's neighbor, of shedding blood (without sufficient cause, without being compelled to it by necessity); this is one of those precepts which is cut deeper than all others into the human heart... But as soon as it is a question of war, that is, of shedding human blood in streams, people of the present time no longer trouble about a sufficient cause. Those who take part in wars do not even think of asking themselves whether these countless murders have any justification; whether they are just or not, lawful or unlawful, innocent or criminal, whether or not they violate the chief law forbidding killing (without lawful cause). But their conscience is silent... War has ceased to be a matter depending on morality. For military men there is no other joy in the labors and dangers they bear than to be victors, no other grief than to be vanquished. Do not tell me that they serve the fatherland. Long ago a great genius answered you in words that have become a proverb: 'Cast aside justice, and what is a state but a great gathering of robbers? And is not a gathering of robbers a little state? Bands of robbers too have their laws. There too they fight to gain booty and even for honor...'

"The aim of this institution (he is speaking of the institution of an international tribunal) is that the European nations should cease to be nations of thieves, and armies bands of robbers — and, I must add, of robbers and thieves. Yes, our armies are crowds of slaves belonging to one or two rulers or ministers, who dispose of them tyrannically, without any responsibility, as we know...

"The peculiarity of a slave is that in his master's hands he is a thing, a tool, and not a person. Such are the soldiers, the officers, the generals, going to be killed and to kill at the will of the ruler or rulers. Military slavery exists, and it is the worst of slaveries, especially now, when by means of compulsory service it puts chains on the necks of all the free and strong men of the nation in order to make of them instruments of murder, executioners, butchers of human flesh, because only for this are they recruited and drilled...

"The rulers, two or three in number, meeting in their cabinets, agree secretly without minutes, without publicity, and therefore without responsibility, and send men to the slaughter."

"Protests against armaments burdensome to the people did not begin in our time," says Signor E. G. Moneta. "Listen to what Montesquieu wrote in his time: 'France (now one may substitute: Europe) will perish from its military men. A new disease has spread in Europe. It has seized kings and compels them to keep an impossible number of troops. This disease is a rash, and therefore contagious, because as soon as one state increases its troops, all the others at once do the same. So that nothing comes of it but general ruin.

"'Every government keeps as many troops as it could keep if its people were threatened with extermination, and people call peace the state of tension of all against all. And therefore Europe is so ruined that if private persons were in the position in which the governments of this part of the world find themselves, the richest of them would have nothing to live on. We are poor, having the wealth and trade of the whole world.'

"This was written almost 150 years ago. The picture seems painted from the present. One thing has changed — the form of government. In Montesquieu's time it was said that the cause of keeping large armies was the unlimited power of kings, who made war in the hope of increasing their private property by victories and of gaining glory.

"People said then: 'Ah, if only the nations could elect those who would have the right to refuse governments soldiers and money, there would be an end to military policy.' Now almost all Europe has representative governments, and in spite of this, military expenses and preparations for war have increased in a terrible proportion.

"Evidently the madness of the rulers has passed to the governing classes. Now wars are no longer made because one king failed in courtesy toward another's mistress, as was the case under Louis XIV; but, exaggerating the honorable and natural feelings of national dignity and patriotism and rousing the public opinion of one nation against another, they reach at last the point where it is enough for it to be said — even if the report is untrue — that the ambassador of your state was not received by the head of another state for the most terrible and ruinous of all the wars there have ever been to break out. Europe now keeps more soldiers under arms than at the time of the great Napoleonic wars. All citizens, with small exceptions, are compelled on our continent to spend several years in barracks. Fortresses, arsenals and ships are built, weapons are constantly produced which in the shortest time are replaced by others, because science, which ought always to be directed to the good of humanity, contributes, unfortunately, to the work of destruction, inventing newer and newer means of killing large numbers of people in the shortest time.

"And in order to keep so many soldiers and make such enormous preparations for murder, hundreds of millions are spent every year, that is, such sums as would be enough for the education of the people and the carrying out of the most enormous works for the public good, and which would make it possible to resolve the social question peacefully.

"Europe therefore finds itself in this respect, in spite of all our scientific victories, in the same position in which it found itself in the worst times of the brutal Middle Ages. Everyone complains of this position, which is not war but is not peace either, and everyone would like to get out of it. The heads of governments assert that they all want peace, and there is a rivalry among them as to which of them will make the most solemn peaceable declarations. But on the same day, or the next, they put before the legislative assembly a proposal to increase armaments, and say that they take such precautions precisely in order to secure peace.

"But this is not the peace we love. And the nations are not deceived by it. True peace has mutual trust at its base, whereas these enormous armaments show a plain and extreme mistrust, if not a hidden hostility, between states. What would we say of a man who, wishing to declare his friendly feelings to his neighbor, invited him to go over the questions between them with a loaded revolver in his hand?

"It is this crying contradiction between the peaceable declarations and the military policy of governments that all good citizens want to end at any cost."

People are surprised that 60,000 suicides take place every year in Europe — only those known and recorded, and excluding Russia and Turkey; but one should be surprised not that so many suicides take place, but that there are so few. Every person of our time, if one goes into the contradiction between his consciousness and his life, is in the most desperate position. Not to speak of all the other contradictions between life and consciousness that fill the life of a person of our time, this last military position in which Europe finds itself, together with its Christian profession, is alone enough for a person to come to despair, to doubt the reasonableness of human nature, and to put an end to his life in this mad and bestial world. This contradiction — the military one, which contains in itself the quintessence of all the other contradictions — is so terrible that one can live taking part in it only if one does not think about it, if one can forget it.

What! We are all Christians, we not only profess love for one another but really live one common life, the pulse of our life beats with the same beats, we help one another, learn from one another, more and more, to our mutual joy, we draw lovingly closer to one another! In this drawing closer is the meaning of the whole of life — and tomorrow some crazed head of a government will say some stupidity, another will answer with the same, and I shall go, exposing myself to being killed, to kill people who not only have done nothing to me, but whom I love. And this is not a remote chance, but the very thing we are all preparing for, and it is not only a probable but an inevitable event.

It is enough to recognize this clearly in order to go mad or shoot oneself. And this very thing does happen, and especially often among military men. One need only come to one's senses for a moment to arrive at the necessity of such an end. Only this explains the terrible intensity with which people of our time strive to stupefy themselves with wine, tobacco, opium, cards, reading newspapers, travel, all kinds of spectacles and amusements. All these things are done as serious, important matters. They are indeed important matters. If there were no outward means of stupefaction, half of all people would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is the most unbearable state. And all people of our time are in this state. All people of our time live in a constant, glaring contradiction between consciousness and life. These contradictions are expressed in economic and state relations as well, but this contradiction is sharpest of all between people's consciousness of the Christian law of the brotherhood of people and the necessity, in which universal military service places all people, for each to be ready for enmity, for murder — for each to be at one and the same time a Christian and a gladiator.

VI

THE ATTITUDE OF THE PEOPLE OF OUR WORLD TO WAR

People do not try to remove the contradiction between life and consciousness by changing their life; and the educated, advanced among them use all their strength to hide the demands of consciousness and to justify their life, and by this draw society toward a state not even pagan, but toward a state of primitive savagery. The vagueness of the attitude of the advanced people of our time to war, to universal armament and to military service. The attitude of some — as to a chance political phenomenon, curable by outward measures alone. The peace congress. An article in the «Revue des Revues». The proposal of M. de Camp. The significance of courts of arbitration and of disarmament. The attitude of governments to people of this sort and to the things they occupy themselves with. The attitude of others — as to a cruel but inevitable phenomenon. Maupassant. Ed. Rod. The attitude of a third group — as to a necessary, even useful thing. Doucet. Claretie. Zola. Vogüé.

The resolution of the contradictions of life and consciousness is possible in two ways: by changing life or by changing consciousness. And in choosing between the two, it would seem, there can be no doubt.

A person can stop doing what he considers bad, but cannot stop considering bad what is bad.

In exactly the same way all humanity can stop doing what it considers bad, but cannot change, nor even hold back for a time, the consciousness — ever becoming clearer and spreading — of what is bad and therefore ought not to be. It would seem that the choice between changing life and changing consciousness ought to be clear and beyond doubt.

And therefore, it would seem, it is inevitable for the Christian humanity of our time to renounce the pagan forms of life which it condemns, and to build its life on the Christian foundations which it recognizes.

But so it would be if there were no law of inertia, as unchangeable in the life of people and nations as in inanimate bodies, which for people is expressed by the psychological law so truly expressed in the Gospel by the words: "And they did not come to the light, because their deeds were evil." This law consists in this: that the majority of people think not in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that they are in the truth, to assure themselves that the life they lead, which is pleasant and habitual to them, is the very one that agrees with the truth.

Slavery was contrary to all those moral principles which Plato and Aristotle preached, and yet neither the one nor the other saw this, because the rejection of slavery destroyed the whole life they lived. The same thing happens in our world.

The division of people into two castes, as well as the violence of the state and of the military, are contrary to all those moral principles by which our world lives, and at the same time the advanced, educated people of our time seem not to see it.

The majority, if not all, of the educated people of our time unconsciously try to hold on to the former social understanding of life, which justifies their position, and to hide from themselves and from people its insufficiency and, above all, the necessity of taking in the Christian understanding of life, which destroys the whole order of existing life. They strive to support the orders founded on the social understanding of life, but they themselves do not believe in it, because it is outlived and can no longer be believed in.

The whole literature of our time — philosophical, political and artistic — is striking in this respect. What wealth of thought, of forms, of colors, what erudition, elegance, abundance of thoughts, and what not only absence of serious content, but some kind of fear of any definiteness of thought and of its expression! Evasions, allegories, jokes, general, the widest considerations, and nothing simple, clear, going to the point, that is, to the question of life.

But it is not enough that graceful trifles are written and spoken; outright vileness and savagery are written and spoken, reasonings are written and spoken in the most refined way which lead people back to primitive savagery, to the foundations of a life not only pagan but even animal, which we lived through five thousand years ago.

It cannot be otherwise. Shunning the Christian understanding of life, which upsets an order that for some is only habitual, for others habitual and profitable, people cannot help going back to the pagan understanding of life and to the teachings founded on it. In our time not only are patriotism and aristocratism preached as they were preached two thousand years ago, but the crudest Epicureanism, animality — with only this difference, that then the people who preached it believed in what they preached, while now the preachers themselves do not believe in what they say, and cannot believe, because what they preach no longer has any meaning. One cannot stay in one place when the ground is moving. If you are not going forward, you are going back. And it is strange and terrible to say: the educated people of our time, the advanced people, by their refined reasonings are in essence drawing society back, toward a state not even pagan, but toward a state of primitive savagery.

Nowhere is this direction of the activity of the advanced people of our time so visible as in their attitude toward the phenomenon in which, in our time, the whole insufficiency of the social understanding of life has been expressed in concentrated form — toward war, toward universal armament and universal military service.

The vagueness, if not dishonesty, of the attitude of the educated people of our time toward this phenomenon is striking. The attitude toward it in our educated society is threefold: some look on this phenomenon as something accidental, arising from the special political position of Europe, and consider it curable by outward diplomatic international measures, without changing the whole inner order of the life of nations. Others look on this phenomenon as something terrible and cruel, but inevitable and fated, like illness or death. A third group calmly and coolly consider war a necessary, beneficial and therefore desirable phenomenon.

People look at the subject differently, but the first, the second and the third alike reason about war as an event completely independent of the will of the people who take part in it, and therefore do not even allow that natural question which occurs to every simple person: "Well, and must I take part in it?" In the opinion of all these people, questions of this kind do not even exist, and everyone, however he himself personally looks at war, must slavishly submit in this respect to the demands of authority.

The attitude of the first group, those who see salvation from wars in diplomatic international measures, is admirably expressed by the result of the last peace congress in London, and by the article and letters about war from prominent writers in No. 8 of the «Revue des Revues» for 1891.

Here are the results of the congress: having gathered the opinions of learned men from different ends of the world, in person or in writing, the congress, beginning with a service of prayer in a cathedral and ending with a dinner with speeches, heard many speeches in the course of five days and came to the following resolutions.

First, the congress expressed its opinion that the direct consequence of brotherhood among people must unavoidably be brotherhood among nations, which recognizes the identity of the interests of each nation separately.

Second, the congress recognized that Christianity has an influence on the moral and political progress of humanity, and therefore reminded the preachers of the Gospel and other persons engaged in spiritual education of the necessity of spreading the rules of peace and of cordial goodwill among people. For this purpose the congress set the 3rd Sunday of every December. On this day there is to be a special proclamation of the principles of peace.

Third, the congress expressed the wish that all teachers of history should draw the attention of youth to the terrible evil which war has always caused humanity, and to the circumstance that in most cases wars arose from very insignificant causes.

Fourth, the congress condemned the teaching of military drill in schools in the form of physical exercises, and proposed replacing the military companies now existing with rescue companies. The congress further expressed the wish to impress on the examining commissions whose duty it is to formulate questions for pupils the necessity of directing the minds of pupils toward the principles of peace.

Fifth, the congress expressed the conviction that the teaching of the rights of man requires that savage and weak nations, their property and their freedom, should find protection from injustice and abuses, and that these nations should be guarded from the vices so widespread among the so-called civilized nations. In the opinion of the congress, the nations ought to act together for this purpose. The congress expressed its heartfelt sympathy with the conclusions of the antislavery conference which sat recently in Brussels and has as its task the improvement of the life of the African savages.

Sixth, the congress expressed the conviction that, since the warlike prejudices and traditions which are still so deeply rooted in some nations, as well as all those warlike speeches which are made in legislative assemblies by some leaders of public opinion and with which the organs of the press are filled, are often indirect causes of war, it would be desirable to print exact information about the relations of nations. For this purpose the congress proposed founding an international newspaper able to answer the above requirements.

Seventh, the congress proposed to the committee to advise its members to advocate on every suitable occasion the projects for unifying weights, measures, coins, postal and telegraph tariffs and so on, which might further the real commercial, industrial and scientific union of nations.

Eighth, in view of the boundless moral and social influence of women, the congress urges them to give their support to everything that can further peace, for otherwise every continuation of the present military situation must lie in greater measure on their responsibility.

Ninth, the congress expressed the hope that the Financial Reform Association and other similar societies in Europe and America would unite to discuss measures for establishing just trade relations between states by abolishing duties. The congress expressed the thought that all civilized nations desire peace and are impatiently awaiting the end of universal armament. These armaments, being made supposedly for defense, are in their turn an evil, since they keep up mistrust and at the same time are the cause of that general economic disorder which does not allow the questions of labor and want, which ought to come first, to be taken up under favorable conditions.

Tenth, the congress recognized universal disarmament as the best guarantee of peace and the first step toward the resolution, to general satisfaction, of the questions which at present divide states, and expressed the wish that in the near future a meeting of representatives of all the states of Europe should be formed to discuss measures that might lead to universal gradual disarmament.

Eleventh, bearing in mind that the indecision of some one state might hold back the convening of the above-mentioned meeting, the congress expressed the opinion that the state which first decides to disband a considerable part of its army will render the most important service to Europe and humanity, since by this very act it will compel other states — under the pressure of public opinion — to follow its example. By its action it will, without doubt, not weaken but only strengthen the natural conditions for the defense of its country.

Twelfth, bearing in mind that the question of disarmament, like that of peace in general, depends to a considerable extent on public opinion, the congress proposed to the peace societies, as well as to all adherents of peace, to engage in active propaganda for it, especially during parliamentary elections, in order to persuade the electors to vote for candidates whose program of action includes the establishment of peace, disarmament and the court of arbitration.

Thirteenth, the congress congratulated the friends of peace on the resolution adopted by the International American Conference (Washington, April), by which obligatory arbitration is recognized as desirable in all disputes and other disagreements, whatever their origin, except those points of dispute which might threaten the independence of one of the countries concerned.

Fourteenth, the congress draws the attention of all European and American statesmen to this resolution, in the hope that in the near future similar treaties will be signed by the remaining nations, with a view to avoiding all conflicts in future and at the same time as an example to other states.

Fifteenth, the congress expressed its satisfaction at the adoption by the Spanish Senate (July 16) of a bill authorizing the government to seek the ratification of treaties drawn up with the help of arbitration for the resolution of all disputed questions, except those which concern the independence or internal government of states.

The congress also expressed its satisfaction at the adoption of resolutions of similar content by the Norwegian Storting and the Italian parliament in the present month.

Sixteenth, the congress resolved to address officially the chief political, religious and commercial societies and workers' unions with the request that these societies petition their governments to adopt the necessary measures for setting up a special commission, whose duties would include the resolution of international disagreements with a view to preventing wars.

Seventeenth, in view of the fact that: 1) the aim pursued by all peace societies consists in establishing a juridical order between nations; that 2) neutralization by means of international treaties is a step toward such a juridical state and toward reducing the number of countries in which war will be possible — the congress proposed extending the rules of neutralization, and expressed the wish that all treaties of neutralization already existing at present should remain in force in future or, if need be, be supplemented in the sense that the neutrality be extended to the whole state, or that the fortresses be destroyed, which are for any neutrality a danger rather than a guarantee.

That new treaties be drawn up (in accordance with the wishes of the peoples) for establishing the neutrality of the remaining states.

Eighteenth, the section of the committee proposed: 1) that the next meetings of the peace congress be held either just before the session of the annual international conference or immediately after it and in the same city; 2) that the question of an international emblem of peace be postponed indefinitely.

That the following resolutions be adopted: 1) To express satisfaction at the official proposal on the part of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to the highest representatives of every religious society of Christian confession to unite for a common discussion of measures that might lead to the replacement of war by international arbitration.

2) To express in the name of the congress deep respect for the memory of Aurelio Saffi, the great Italian jurist, member of the committee of international peace and freedom.

3) That the reports of this congress, signed by the president, be as far as possible delivered to the heads of all civilized states by authoritative deputations.

4) That the organizing committee be empowered to make the necessary corrections in the papers and resolutions adopted here.

5) That the following resolutions be adopted: a) to express gratitude to the presidents of all the separate sessions of the congress; b) to express gratitude to the chairman, the secretaries and the members of the bureau of the congress; c) to express gratitude to the members of the various sections of the committee; d) to express to Canon Scott-Holland, Doctor Reuen Thomas and I. Morgan Gibbon thanks for their sermons before the opening of the congress and the request to supply copies of these sermons for printing, and also to the heads of St. Paul's Cathedral, the City Temple and the Congregational Church of Stamford Hill for the use of these buildings for public purposes; e) to draw up an address of thanks to Her Majesty for permission to visit Windsor Castle, f) and also to express gratitude to the Lord Mayor, his wife, Mr. Passmore Edwards and other friends who showed hospitality to the members of the congress.

Nineteenth, the congress expressed its deep gratitude to the Almighty for the remarkable harmony that reigned at the meetings of the congress, at which so many men and women of the most varied nationalities and creeds gathered for close common work, and for the successful completion of the labors of the congress.

The congress expressed its firm and unshakable faith in the final triumph of peace and of those principles which were defended at these meetings.

The fundamental idea of the congress is that it is necessary, first, to spread by every means among all people the conviction that war is very unprofitable for people and that peace is a great good, and, second, to act on governments, impressing on them the advantages of an international tribunal over wars, and therefore the profitableness and necessity of disarmament. To reach the first aim the congress turns to teachers of history, to women and to the clergy with the advice to preach to people every 3rd Sunday of December the evil of war and the good of peace; to reach the second, the congress turns to governments, proposing to them disarmament and the replacement of war by arbitration.

To preach to people the evil of war and the good of peace! But the evil of war and the good of peace are so well known to people that, ever since we have known people, the best wish has been the greeting "peace be with you" — so why preach it?

Not only Christians, but all pagans thousands of years ago knew the evil of war and the good of peace. So that the advice to preachers of the Gospel to preach about the evil of war and the good of peace on the 3rd Sunday of December is completely superfluous.

A Christian cannot help preaching this always, on all the days of his life. And if Christians and preachers of Christianity do not do it, there must be causes for this. And until these causes are removed, no advice will be effective. Still less effective can be the advice to governments to disband their armies and replace them with international tribunals. Governments too know very well all the difficulty and burden of raising and maintaining armies, and if, in spite of that, they raise and keep armies with terrible efforts and strain, then obviously they cannot act otherwise, and the advice of the congress can in no way change this. But the learned will in no way see this, and keep hoping to find a combination in which the governments that make wars would limit (themselves) by their own will.

"Is it possible to rid ourselves of war?" writes a learned man in the «Revue des Revues». "Everyone agrees that if it breaks out in Europe, its consequences will be like the great invasions of the barbarians. In the coming war the existence of whole nationalities will be at stake, and therefore it will be bloody, desperate, cruel.

"It is this consideration, together with those terrible weapons of destruction which the newest science has at its disposal, that holds back the moment of the declaration of war and keeps up the present temporary order of things, which might continue for an indefinite time were it not for those terrible expenses which crush the European nations and threaten to bring the nations to calamities no less than those war will produce.

"Struck by this thought, people of different countries have looked for means to stop, or at least to soften, the consequences of the terrible slaughter that threatens them.

"Such are the questions put on the agenda by the congress expected soon in Rome and by the publication of pamphlets on disarmament.

"Unfortunately, it is beyond doubt that with the present organization of the majority of European states, distant from one another and guided by different interests, the complete ending of war is a dream with which it would be dangerous to comfort oneself. However, some more reasonable laws and rules accepted by all in these duels between nations might considerably lessen the horrors of war.

"It is equally utopian to count on disarmament, which is almost impossible because of considerations of a national character, understood by our readers. (Probably this means that France cannot disarm before the revanche.) Public opinion is not ready to accept projects of disarmament, and besides, international relations are not such that they could be accepted.

"Disarmament demanded by one nation of another would be equal to a declaration of war.

"However, one may still allow that an exchange of views between the nations concerned will help to some extent toward an international agreement and make possible a considerable reduction of the military expenses that now crush the European nations to the detriment of the resolution of social questions, the necessity of which is felt by each state separately under the threat of provoking an internal war by efforts to prevent an external one.

"One may at least suppose a reduction of the enormous expenses needed for the present military organization, which has as its aim the possibility of seizing the enemy's territory in 24 hours and giving a decisive battle a week after the declaration of war!"

It must be arranged so that states cannot suddenly attack others and seize foreign territory in 24 hours.

This practical thought was expressed by Maxime du Camp, and to this the conclusion of the article also comes down.

The proposals of M. du Camp are the following:

"1) A diplomatic congress must meet every year.

"2) No war may be declared earlier than two months after the event (incident) which provokes it. (The difficulty here will be to determine which incident exactly provokes a war, since in every declaration of war there are very many such incidents, and one must decide from which to count the two months.)

"3) War may not be declared before it has been put to the vote of the nations preparing for it.

"4) Military operations may not begin earlier than a month after the declaration of war."

"A war may not be begun... must... and so on." But who will see to it that a war may not be begun? Who will see to it that people must do this and that? Who will compel a power to wait for the appointed term? All the others. But all the others are exactly the same kind of powers, which must be moderated and kept within bounds and compelled. Who then will compel? and how? Public opinion. But if there is a public opinion that can compel a power to wait for the appointed term, then the same public opinion can compel a power not to begin a war at all.

But, they answer to this, such a balancing of forces is possible, a pondération des forces, in which the powers will hold themselves back. But this is just what is demanded now too. This very thing was the Holy Alliance, this very thing is the League of Peace and so on.

But if all agree, they answer to this. But if all agree, then there will be no war either, and no need for supreme tribunals, or courts of arbitration, or arbitration.

"The court of arbitration, arbitration will replace wars. Questions will be decided by a court of arbitration; the Alabama question was decided by a court of arbitration; it has been proposed that the question of the Caroline Islands be decided by the Pope as arbiter. Switzerland and Belgium and Denmark and Holland have all declared that they prefer the decisions of a court of arbitration to war." It seems Monaco too has declared the same wish. Only one thing is annoying: that Germany, Russia, Austria, France have not so far declared the same.

It is amazing how people can deceive themselves when they need to deceive themselves.

Governments will agree to decide their disagreements by a court of arbitration and will therefore disband their armies. The misunderstandings between Russia and Poland, England and Ireland, Austria and Bohemia, Turkey and the Slavs, the misunderstandings between France and Germany will be resolved by voluntary agreement.

It is just the same as if one proposed to merchants and bankers that they sell nothing dearer than the purchase price, but occupy themselves with distributing wealth without profits, and abolish money, which would as a consequence have become unnecessary.

But trade and banking consist only in selling dearer than one buys, and therefore the proposal not to sell dearer than the purchase price and to abolish money is equal to a proposal to abolish oneself. The same with governments. The proposal to governments not to use violence but to resolve misunderstandings according to justice is a proposal to abolish themselves as governments; and to this no government can agree.

Learned people gather in societies (there are many such societies, more than 100), gather at congresses (there were such lately in Paris and London, and now there will be one in Rome), read papers, dine, make speeches, publish journals devoted to this aim, and in all of them it is proved that the strain of nations compelled to maintain millions of troops has reached the extreme limit, and that this armament contradicts all the aims, qualities and desires of all nations, but that if a great deal of paper is written over and many words said, all people can be brought into agreement and made to have no opposed interests, and then there will be no war.

When I was little, I was assured that to catch a bird one must sprinkle salt on its tail. I went out with salt to the birds, but at once became convinced that if I could sprinkle salt on its tail I could also catch it, and understood that they had been laughing at me.

The same must be understood by people reading articles and books about courts of arbitration and disarmament.

If one can sprinkle salt on a bird's tail, that means it does not fly, and there is no need to catch it. But if a bird has wings and does not want to be caught, it will not let salt be sprinkled on its tail, because it is the nature of a bird to fly. In exactly the same way the nature of a government consists not in submitting but in subjecting others to itself. And a government is a government only in so far as it can not submit but subject, and therefore it always strives for this and can never voluntarily renounce power; and power is given it by the army, and therefore it will never renounce the army and the use of it for war.

The error rests on this: that learned jurists, deceiving themselves and others, assert in their books that a government is not what it is — a gathering of some people who do violence to others — but that governments, as it comes out in science, are the representatives of the aggregate of citizens. The learned have assured others of this so long that they have come to believe it themselves, and it often seriously seems to them that justice can be binding on governments. But history shows that from Caesar to Napoleon, both the one and the other, and Bismarck, government is in its essence always a force that violates justice, as it cannot be otherwise. Justice cannot be binding on a person or people who keep at hand deceived people trained for violence — soldiers — and by means of them govern others. And therefore governments cannot agree to reduce the number of these trained people who obey them and who make up their whole strength and significance.

Such is the attitude of one set of learned people to the contradiction that weighs on our world, and such are their means of resolving it. Tell these people that the question lies only in the personal attitude of each person to the moral religious question now put before each — the lawfulness or unlawfulness of taking part in universal military service — and these learned people will only shrug their shoulders and not even honor you with an answer or attention. The resolution of the question for them is to read papers, write books, elect presidents, vice-presidents, secretaries, and sit and talk now in one city, now in another. From these conversations and writings, in their opinion, it will happen that governments will stop recruiting soldiers, on whom their whole strength rests, but will listen to their speeches and let their soldiers go, remaining defenseless not only before their neighbors but also before their own subjects; just as robbers who have tied up unarmed people in order to rob them would, on hearing speeches about the pain the rope causes those tied up, at once untie them.

But there are people who believe in this, occupy themselves with peace congresses, read papers, write little books, and governments of course express sympathy with this, pretend to support it, just as they pretend to support temperance societies while for the most part living on the drunkenness of the people; just as they pretend to support education while their strength rests only on ignorance; just as they pretend to support the freedom of the constitution while their strength rests only on the absence of freedom; they pretend to care about improving the life of the workers while their existence is founded on the oppression of the worker; they pretend to support Christianity while Christianity destroys every government.

In order to be able to do this, such concerns about temperance were long ago worked out as cannot disturb drunkenness; such concerns about education as not only do not hinder ignorance but only increase it; such concerns about freedom and the constitution as do not hinder despotism; such concerns about the workers as do not free them from slavery; such a Christianity as does not destroy but supports governments.

Now one more concern has been added — about peace. Governments, straightforwardly the tsars, who now travel about with their ministers, deciding by their own will alone the questions whether to begin the murder of millions this year or next — these tsars know very well that talk of peace will not hinder them, when it occurs to them, from sending millions to the slaughter. The tsars even listen with pleasure to this talk, encourage it and take part in it.

All this is not only not harmful but useful to governments, turning people's eyes away from the most important, most essential question: whether or not each individual person called up as a soldier is to go and serve his military service.

"Peace will soon be arranged now, thanks to alliances and congresses, according to little books and pamphlets; but meanwhile go, put on the uniform, and be ready to oppress and torment yourselves for our profit," say the governments. And the learned, the organizers of congresses and articles, fully agree with this.

This is one attitude — the most profitable for governments, and therefore encouraged by all clever governments.

The other attitude is the tragic one, of people who assert that the contradiction between people's striving for and love of peace and the necessity of war is terrible, but that such is the fate of man. These people are for the most part sensitive, gifted people; they see and understand all the horror and all the unreasonableness and cruelty of war, but by some strange turn of thought they do not see and do not seek any way out of this position, and, as though scratching their wound, they admire the desperateness of the position of humanity.

Here is a remarkable example of such an attitude to war, by a remarkable French writer (Maupassant). Looking from his yacht at the drill and firing of French soldiers, the following thoughts come to him:

"War! One need only think of this word, and a feeling of horror and stupefaction comes over me, as though they were speaking to me of witchcraft, of the Inquisition, as though they were speaking to me of something far off, finished, loathsome, monstrous, unnatural.

"When we are told about cannibals, we smile with pride, feeling our superiority over these savages. But who are the savages? Who are the real savages? Those who kill in order to eat the vanquished, or those who kill in order to kill, only in order to kill?

"There on the meadow the riflemen run and fire at the word of command; they are all destined to death, like a flock of sheep which the butcher drives along the road. They will fall somewhere on a meadow with a cloven head or a breast pierced by a bullet. And all these are young men who could work, produce, be useful.

"Their fathers are old, their poor mothers, who for 20 years loved them, adored them as only mothers can adore, will learn in six months or a year, perhaps, that their son, their grown son, brought up with such labor, with such expense, with such love, that this son, torn apart by a cannonball, trampled by the cavalry that rode over him, has been thrown into a pit like a dead dog. And she will ask: why did they kill her dear boy — her hope, her pride, her life? No one knows. Yes, why?

"War! To fight! To slaughter! To kill people! Yes, in our time, with our enlightenment, with our science, with our philosophy, there exist special schools in which people are taught to kill, to kill from afar, with perfection, to kill many people at once, to kill unhappy, pitiful people, people guilty of nothing, who support families, and to kill them without any trial.

"And the most amazing thing is that the people do not rise against the governments — it is all the same, in a monarchy or a republic. The most amazing thing is that the whole of society does not revolt at the mere word war.

"Yes, evidently we shall always live by the old, terrible customs, the criminal superstitions, the bloodthirsty notions of our ancestors. Evidently, as we were beasts, so we shall remain beasts, guided only by instinct.

"Hardly anyone but Victor Hugo could have raised the cry of deliverance and truth with impunity.

"'Force is already beginning to be called violence and to be judged,' he said. 'War is being summoned to trial. Enlightenment, on the complaint of the human race, is conducting a lawsuit and presenting an indictment against all conquerors and generals.

"'People are beginning to understand that the increase of a crime cannot be its diminution; that if murder is a crime, the murder of many cannot be an extenuating circumstance; that if it is shameful to steal, seizure can in no way be an object of glorification.

"'Let us proclaim then this undoubted truth, let us dishonor war.'

"Vain anger," Maupassant continues, "the indignation of a poet. War is respected, honored now more than ever. A skilled artist in this line, a murderer of genius, Herr von Moltke, once answered the delegates of a peace society with the following terrible words: 'War is holy and of divine institution; war is one of the sacred laws of the world; it keeps alive in people all the great and noble feelings: honor, disinterestedness, virtue, courage. Only because of war do people not fall into the crudest materialism.'

"To gather in herds of 400 thousand men, to march without rest day and night, thinking of nothing, studying nothing, learning nothing, reading nothing, bringing use to no one, wallowing in filth, sleeping in mud, living like cattle in constant stupefaction, plundering cities, burning villages, ruining nations; then, meeting another such accumulation of human flesh, to throw oneself upon it, shed rivers of blood, cover the fields with smashed bodies mixed with mud and bloodied earth, lose arms and legs, and with a smashed head and without any use to anyone whatever, die like a beast somewhere on a field boundary, while your old parents, your wife and your children are dying of hunger — this is called not falling into the crudest materialism.

"Military men are the chief calamity of the world. We struggle with nature, with ignorance, in order to improve our pitiful existence even a little. Scientists devote their whole life to labor in order to find means to help, to ease the lot of their brothers. And, laboring stubbornly and making discovery after discovery, they enrich the human mind, widen science, every day give new knowledge, every day increasing the well-being, the plenty, the strength of the people.

"And then war comes. In six months the generals destroy all that was created in the course of 20 years of effort, patience, genius. And all this is called not falling into the crudest materialism.

"We have seen it, war. We have seen how people became beasts again, how, like madmen, they killed for pleasure, from fear, for bravado, for boasting. We have seen how, freed from the notions of law and right, they shot innocent people caught on the road who seemed suspicious only because they were frightened. We have seen how they killed dogs chained at their masters' doors, only to try out a new revolver. We have seen how they shot cows lying in the field without any need, only to shoot for fun. And this is called not falling into the most hideous materialism.

"To enter a country, cut the throat of a man who defends his house because he is dressed in a smock and has no military cap on his head; to burn the houses of poor people who have nothing to eat, break and steal furniture, drink the wine from other people's cellars, rape women in the streets, burn powder for millions of francs, and leave behind one ruin and disease — this is called not falling into the crudest materialism.

"What then, in the end, have they done, the military men, what are their exploits? Nothing. What have they invented? Cannons and rifles. That is all.

"What has Greece left us? Books, marbles. Is she great because she conquered, or because she produced? It was not the invasions of the Persians that kept the Greeks from falling into the crudest materialism. It was not the invasions of the barbarians into Rome that saved and regenerated it! Did Napoleon I perhaps continue the great intellectual movement begun by the philosophers of the end of the last century?

"No, if governments take on themselves the right to send nations to death, then there is nothing surprising in nations sometimes taking on themselves the right to send their governments to death too.

"They defend themselves, and they are right. No one has the right to govern others. One may govern others only for the good of those one governs. And he who governs is obliged to avoid war, just as the captain of a ship is obliged to avoid shipwreck.

"When a captain is to blame for the wreck of his ship, he is tried and sentenced if he proves guilty of negligence or even of incapacity.

"Why then should the government not be tried too after every war declared? If only the people understood this, if they tried the authorities that lead them to murder, if they refused to go to death without need, if they used the weapons given them against those who gave them — if this ever happened, war would die.

"But this will never happen" («Sur l'eau», pp. 71–80).

The author sees all the horror of war; he sees that its cause is that governments, deceiving people, compel them to go and kill and die without any need for it on their part; he sees too that the people who make up the armies could turn their weapons against the governments and call them to account. But the author thinks that this will never happen, and that therefore there is no way out of this position. He thinks that the business of war is terrible, but that it is inevitable, that the governments' demand that people go for soldiers is as inevitable as death, and that since governments will always demand this, there will always be wars.

So writes a gifted, sincere writer, endowed with that penetration into the essence of a subject which makes up the essence of the poetic gift. He puts before us all the cruelty of the contradiction between people's consciousness and their activity, and, not resolving it, recognizes as it were that this contradiction must be, and that in it lies the poetic tragedy of life.

Another writer, no less gifted (E. Rod), describes still more vividly the cruelty and madness of the present position, and likewise in order to recognize its tragedy, neither proposing nor foreseeing a way out of this position.

"And why do anything, undertake anything?" he says. "And is it possible to love people in the present troubled times, when tomorrow is nothing but a threat? All that we have begun, all our ripening thoughts, all our intended works, all the good, however small, that we can do — will not all this be swept away by the storm that is gathering?

"The earth trembles everywhere under our feet, and the gathering cloud will not pass us by.

"Yes, if only the revolution that frightens us were the thing to fear. Since I cannot think of a society more loathsomely ordered than ours, I do not fear the new order that will replace ours. If I were worse off from the change, I would comfort myself that today's executioners were yesterday's victims. I would bear the worse while waiting for the better. But it is not this distant danger that frightens me — I see another, closer, crueler, because there is no justification for it, because no good can come of it.

Every day people weigh the chances of war for tomorrow. And every day these chances become more inevitable.

"The mind refuses to believe in the possibility of the catastrophe that presents itself at the end of the century as the consequence of all the progress of our era, and yet one must get used to believing it.

"For 20 years all the powers of knowledge have been exhausted on inventing weapons of destruction, and soon a few cannon shots will be enough to destroy a whole army.¹² It is not, as before, a few thousand poor wretches whose blood was bought for money who are armed; now whole nations, to the last man, are armed, getting ready to cut one another's throats.

"From these people their time is first stolen (by taking them as soldiers) in order afterward to steal their lives the more surely. To prepare them for the slaughter, their hatred is kindled by assuring them that they are hated. And meek, good people take the bait, and any moment now crowds of peaceful citizens, obeying an absurd order, will throw themselves on one another with the cruelty of wild beasts. And all, God knows, because of some ridiculous clash on the frontier or because of commercial colonial calculations.

"And they will go like sheep to the slaughter, not knowing where they are going, knowing that they are abandoning their wives, that their children will go hungry; and they will go timidly, but intoxicated by the sonorous words that will be trumpeted into their ears. And they will go without a word, submissive and humble, not knowing and not understanding that they are the force, that power would be in their hands if only they wished it, if only they could and knew how to agree among themselves and establish common sense and brotherhood in place of the savage tricks of the diplomats.

"And they will go so deceived that they will believe that slaughter, the murder of people, is a duty, and will ask God to bless their bloodthirsty desires. And they will go trampling the fields they themselves sowed, burning the towns they themselves built; they will go with shouts of rapture, with joy, with festive music. And the sons will raise monuments to those who better than all others killed their fathers.

"The fate of a whole generation depends on the hour at which some gloomy politician gives the sign at which they will throw themselves on one another.

"We all know that the best of us will be cut down and that our works will be destroyed in the bud.

"We know it, we shudder with anger, and we can do nothing. We are caught in the net of various government offices and headed papers, which is too hard to break.

"We are in the power of the laws which we ourselves made to protect ourselves, and which oppress us.

"We have ceased to be people and have become things — the property of an invented something which we call the state, which enslaves each in the name of the will of all, while all, taken separately, want exactly the opposite of what they are made to do...

"And it would be well if it were only a matter of one generation. But the matter is far more important. All these paid shouters, all the ambitious men who make use of the bad passions of the crowd, all the poor in spirit deceived by the sonority of words, have so inflamed national hatreds that the outcome of tomorrow's war will decide the fate of a whole nation. The vanquished will have to disappear, and a new Europe will be formed on foundations so crude, so bloodthirsty, and so disgraced by such crimes that it cannot help being still worse, still more wicked, still more savage and violent.

"So one feels that a terrible hopelessness hangs over everyone. We rush about in a blind alley with rifles aimed at us from all sides. We work like sailors on a ship that is sinking. Our pleasure is the pleasure of a man condemned to death, who is allowed to choose any dish he likes a quarter of an hour before the execution. Horror dulls our thought, and its highest exercise is to calculate — weighing the vague speeches of ministers, the words spoken by a tsar, twisting the sayings of diplomats with which the newspapers are filled — to calculate when exactly, this year or next, we are to be slaughtered.

"One can hardly find a time in history in which life was less secure and more full of oppressive horror" (E. Rod, «Le sens de la vie», pp. 208–213).

It is pointed out that the power is in the hands of those who are themselves destroying themselves, in the hands of the separate people who make up the masses; it is pointed out that the source of the evil is in the state. It would seem clear that the contradiction between consciousness and life has reached the limit beyond which it cannot go and after which its resolution must come.

But the author does not think so. He sees in this the tragedy of human life, and, having shown all the horror of the position, concludes that it is in this horror that human life must go on.

Such is the second attitude to war, of people who recognize in it something fated and tragic.

The third attitude is the attitude of people who have lost their conscience, and therefore their common sense and human feeling as well.

To such people belongs Moltke, whose judgment Maupassant quotes, and the majority of military men, brought up in this cruel superstition, living by it and therefore often naïvely convinced that war is not only an inevitable but a necessary, even useful thing. So judge too non-military people, the so-called learned, educated, refined people.

Here is what the famous academician Doucet writes, in that number of the «Revue des Revues» in which letters about war are collected, in answer to the editor's question about his view of war:

"Dear Sir!

"When you ask the most peaceable of academicians whether he is a supporter of war, his answer is ready in advance: unfortunately, dear sir, you yourself consider a dream the peaceable thoughts which at present inspire our generous fellow countrymen.

"As long as I have lived in the world I have often had occasion to hear from many private persons indignation at this terrifying habit of international slaughter. Everyone recognizes and laments this evil; but how is it to be helped? Very often attempts have been made to abolish duels: it seemed so easy! But no! All the efforts made to reach this aim have served no purpose and never will serve any.

"However much is said against war and against the duel at all the peace congresses, above all arbitrations, all treaties, all legislation there will eternally stand the honor of man, which has eternally demanded the duel, and the interests of nations, which will eternally demand war,

"I nonetheless hope with all my heart that the congress of universal peace will succeed in its very difficult and very honorable task.

"Accept the assurance, etc.

C. Doucet."

The meaning is that the honor of people demands that they fight, and the interests of nations that they ruin and destroy one another, while attempts to end wars are worthy only of a smile.

Of the same kind is the opinion of another famous man, Jules Claretie (Jules Claretie):

"Dear Sir," he writes, "for a reasonable person there can be only one opinion on the question of peace and war.

"Humanity is created in order to live, and to live with the freedom to perfect and improve its lot, its condition, by means of peaceful labor. The universal harmony which the universal peace congress seeks and preaches is perhaps only a beautiful dream, but in any case a dream, the most beautiful of all. Man always has before his eyes the promised land of the future; the harvest will ripen without fear of harm from shells and cannon wheels.

"Only... Yes — only!.. Since the world is not governed by philosophers and benefactors, it is fortunate that our soldiers guard our frontiers and our hearths, and that their weapons, truly aimed, are for us perhaps the very best guarantee of this peace, so ardently loved by us all.

"Peace is granted only to the strong and resolute.

"Accept the assurance, etc.

J. Claretie."

The meaning is that it does no harm to talk about the very thing which no one intends to do and which must in no way be done. But when it comes to the deed, one must fight.

And here is another, most recent, expression of opinion about the significance of war, uttered by the most popular novelist of Europe — E. Zola.

"I consider war a fatal necessity, which is inevitable for us in view of its close connection with human nature and the whole universe. I should like war to be put off for as long a time as possible. Nevertheless the moment will come when we shall be forced to fight. I am taking at this moment the general human point of view, and am in no way hinting at our discord with Germany, which is only an insignificant incident in the history of humanity. I say that war is necessary and useful, since it is for humanity one of the conditions of existence. We meet war everywhere, not only between different tribes and nations, but also in family and private life. It is one of the chief elements of progress, and every step forward that humanity has made so far has been accompanied by bloodshed.

"People have talked, and still talk, about disarmament, and yet disarmament is something impossible, and even if it were possible, we should have to reject it even in that case. Only an armed nation is mighty and great. I am convinced that a general worldwide disarmament would bring with it something like a moral decline, which would show itself in a general powerlessness and would stand in the way of the progressive advance of humanity. A warlike nation has always enjoyed flourishing strength. The art of war brought with it the development of all the other arts. History bears witness to this. Thus, in Athens and in Rome trade, industry and literature never reached such development as at the time when these cities ruled the world then known by force of arms. To take an example from times nearer to us, let us recall the age of Louis XIV. The wars of the great king not only did not hold back the progress of the arts and sciences, but even, on the contrary, seemed to help and favor their advance."

War is a useful thing!

But best of all in this sense is the opinion of the most gifted of the writers of this frame of mind, the opinion of the academician Vogüé. Here is what he writes in an article about the Exhibition, on visiting the military section:

"On the Esplanade des Invalides, among the exotic and colonial buildings, one structure of a more severe style stands out from the picturesque bazaar; all these representatives of the inhabitants of the globe adjoin the palace of war. A magnificent occasion for antitheses for humanitarian rhetoric; and it does not miss the chance to lament such juxtapositions and to assert that this will kill that (ceci tuera cela)¹³, that the union of nations through science and labor will conquer the military instincts. Let us not prevent it from caressing with hope the chimera of a golden age, which, if it were realized, would very soon become an age of mud. All history teaches us that the one is made by the other, that blood is needed to hasten and seal the union of nations. The natural sciences in our time have confirmed the mysterious law revealed to Joseph de Maistre by the inspiration of his genius and by meditation on primitive dogmas; he saw how the world redeems its hereditary falls by sacrifice; the sciences show us how the world is perfected by struggle and violent selection; this is the affirmation from two sides of one and the same decree, drawn up in different terms. The affirmation is of course unpleasant; but the laws of the world are not established for our pleasure, they are established for our perfecting. Let us enter then this inevitable, necessary palace of war, and we shall have occasion to observe how the most stubborn of our instincts, losing nothing of its force, is transformed, submitting to the various demands of historical moments."

This thought — namely, that the proof of the necessity of war is found in two expressions of what are, in his opinion, two great thinkers, Maistre and Darwin — pleases Vogüé so much that he repeats it once more.

"Dear Sir," he writes to the editor of the «Revue des Revues», "you ask my opinion about the success of the universal peace congress. I believe, as Darwin does, that violent struggle is a law of nature which governs all beings.

"Like Joseph de Maistre, I believe that it is a divine law: two different names for one and the same thing. If, against all expectation, some particle of humanity — let us say even the whole civilized West — managed to stop the action of this law, then other, more primitive nations would apply it against us. In these nations the voice of nature would get the upper hand over the voice of human reason. And they would act successfully, because the certainty of peace — I do not say 'peace' itself, but 'complete certainty of peace' — would produce in people a corruption and decline that act more destructively than the most terrible war. I find that for war, this criminal law, one must do the same as for the other criminal laws: soften them, try to make them unnecessary, and apply them as rarely as possible. But all history teaches us that these laws cannot be abolished as long as there remain on earth two people, bread, money, and between them a woman.

"I should be very happy if the congress proved the contrary to me. But I doubt that it could refute history, the law of nature and the law of God.

"Accept the assurance, etc.

E. M. Vogüé."

The meaning is that history, human nature and God show us that as long as there are two people and between them bread, money and a woman, there will be war. That is, that no progress will bring people to move off the savage understanding of life in which bread, money (money is very good here) and a woman cannot be divided without a fight.

Strange are the people who gather in congresses and make speeches about how to catch birds by sprinkling salt on their tails, though they cannot help knowing that this cannot be done; amazing are those who, like Maupassant, Rod and many others, see clearly all the horror of war, all the contradiction that follows from people's doing not what is needful, profitable and right for them to do, and lament the tragedy of life at it, and do not see that this whole tragedy will end at once as soon as people stop reasoning about what they have no need to reason about, and begin not doing what is painful, unpleasant and repugnant to them to do. These people are amazing; but the people who, like Vogüé and others, professing the law of evolution, recognize war as not only inevitable but useful and therefore desirable — these people are frightening, terrible in their moral perversion. The others at least say that they hate evil and love good, but these openly recognize that there is no good and evil.

All the talk about the possibility of establishing peace instead of eternal war is the harmful sentimentality of chatterers. There is a law of evolution according to which it comes out that I must live and act badly. What is to be done? I am an educated person, and I know the law of evolution, and therefore I will act badly. «Entrons au palais de la guerre» (Let us enter the palace of war). There is a law of evolution, and therefore there is nothing either bad or good, but one must live for one's own personal life alone, leaving the rest to be done by the law of evolution. This is the last word of refined education, and at the same time of that darkening of consciousness with which the educated classes of our time are occupied.

The desire of the educated classes to hold on somehow to their favorite ideas and the life founded on them has reached its last limits. They lie, they deceive themselves and others in the most refined forms, only in order somehow to darken, to stifle consciousness.

Instead of changing their life in accordance with consciousness, they try by every means to darken, to stifle consciousness. But the light shines even in the darkness, and so it is beginning to shine in our time.

VII

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF UNIVERSAL MILITARY SERVICE

Universal military service is not a political accident, but the last limit of the contradiction contained in the social understanding of life. The rise of authority in society. The basis of authority is bodily violence. For authority to be able to commit violence it needs an organization of armed people — an army. The rise of authority, that is, of violence, in society is the principle that decomposes the social understanding of life. The relation of authority and the masses, the relation of governments and the workers, that is, of conquered people. Governments try to keep the workers convinced of the necessity of state violence for security from external enemies. But the army is needed chiefly for defense against their own subjects, the oppressed workers. Caprivi's speech. All the advantages of the ruling classes are secured by violence. The growth of armies up to universal military service. Universal military service destroys all those advantages of social life which the state is called on to protect. Universal military service is the last limit of obedience, since in the name of the state it demands the renunciation of everything that can be dear to a person. Is the state necessary? The sacrifices it demands of citizens through universal military service no longer have any grounds. And it is more profitable for a person not to submit to the demands of the state than to submit to them.

The educated people of the upper classes try to stifle the ever clearer consciousness of the necessity of changing the present order of life; but life, continuing to develop and grow more complex in the former direction, intensifying the contradictions and sufferings of people, brings them to that last limit beyond which it is impossible to go. Such a last limit of contradiction, beyond which it is impossible to go, is universal military service.

It is usually thought that universal military service, and the ever-increasing armaments connected with it, and the ever-increasing taxes and state debts that follow in all nations, are an accidental phenomenon, arising from a certain political position of Europe, and can likewise be removed by certain political considerations, without changing the inner order of life.

This is completely wrong. Universal military service is only the inner contradiction that crept into the social understanding of life, carried to its last limits and become obvious at a certain level of material development.

The social understanding of life consists, after all, in this: that the meaning of life is carried over from the personality to the aggregate and succession of personalities — to the tribe, the family, the clan or the state.

According to the social understanding of life it is supposed that, since the meaning of life lies in the aggregate of personalities, the personalities themselves voluntarily sacrifice their interests for the interests of the aggregate. And so it was and is in reality in certain forms of aggregates — in the family or the tribe, whichever came first, or in the clan and even in the patriarchal state. By custom, handed down by upbringing and confirmed by religious suggestion, personalities without compulsion merged their interests with the interests of the aggregate and sacrificed their own for the common.

But the more complex societies became, the larger they became, and especially the more often conquest was the cause of people's joining together in societies, the more often personalities strove to reach their aims to the harm of the common, and the more often, to restrain these insubordinate personalities, the use of authority, that is, of violence, became needed.

The defenders of the social understanding of life usually try to confuse the concept of authority, that is, of violence, with the concept of spiritual influence, but this confusion is completely impossible.

Spiritual influence is such an action on a person as changes the very desires of the person so that they coincide with what is demanded of him. A person who submits to spiritual influence acts in accordance with his desires. But authority, as this word is usually understood, is a means of compelling a person to act contrary to his desires. A person who submits to authority acts not as he wants, but as authority compels him to act. And to compel a person to do not what he wants but what he does not want can only be done by physical violence or the threat of it, that is, by deprivation of freedom, beatings, mutilation, or easily carried-out threats of these actions. In this consists, and always has consisted, authority.

In spite of the unceasing efforts of the people in authority to hide this and to give authority another meaning, authority is the applying to a person of a rope, a chain, with which he will be bound and dragged, or of a whip with which he will be flogged, or of a knife, an axe, with which his hands, feet, nose, ears, head will be cut off — the applying of these means or the threat of them. And so it was under Nero and Genghis Khan, and so it is now, under the most liberal government, in the American and the French republic. If people submit to authority, it is only because they fear that, in case of their not submitting, these actions will be applied to them. All the government's demands for the payment of taxes, the carrying out of public duties, the submitting of oneself to the punishments imposed, banishment, fines and the like, to which people seem to submit voluntarily, always have bodily violence or the threat of it at their base.

The basis of authority is bodily violence.

And the possibility of committing bodily violence on people is given above all by an organization of armed people such that all the armed people act in concert, submitting to one will. Such gatherings of armed people submitting to one will make up an army. The army has always stood, and now stands, at the base of authority. Authority is always in the hands of those who command the army, and all rulers — from the Roman Caesars to the Russian and German emperors — have always cared most of all about the army, have courted only the army, knowing that if the army is with them, power is in their hands.

It is this very formation and increase of the army, necessary for maintaining authority, that brought into the social understanding of life the principle that decomposes it.

The aim of authority and its justification consists in restraining those people who would want to reach their interests to the harm of the interests of the aggregate. But whether authority was acquired by the forming of a new army, by inheritance or by election, the people who through the army have authority were in no way different from other people, and therefore, just like other people, were inclined not to subordinate their interests to the interests of the aggregate, but, on the contrary, having in their hands the possibility of doing so, were more inclined than all others to subordinate the common interests to their own. However many means people have devised to deprive the people standing in authority of the possibility of subordinating the common interests to their own, or to hand over authority only to infallible people, no means has so far been found for reaching either the one or the other.

All the methods used — divine blessing, and election, and heredity, and voting, and elections, and assemblies, and parliaments, and senates — all these measures have proved and are proving ineffective. Everyone knows that not one of these methods reaches either the aim of entrusting authority only to infallible people, or that of preventing its abuse. Everyone knows that, on the contrary, people in authority — be they emperors, ministers, chiefs of police, policemen — always, because they have authority, become more inclined to immorality, that is, to subordinating the common interests to personal ones, than people who have no authority, as it cannot be otherwise.

The social understanding of life was justified only so long as all people voluntarily sacrificed their interests to the interests of the common; but as soon as people appeared who did not voluntarily sacrifice their interests, and authority, that is, violence, became needed to restrain these personalities, there entered into the social understanding of life, and into the order founded on it, the principle that decomposes it — authority, that is, the violence of some people over others.

For the authority of some people over others to reach its aim of restraining people who strove toward personal aims to the harm of the common, it was necessary that authority be in the hands of infallible people, as is supposed among the Chinese, or as was supposed in the Middle Ages, and is now for people who believe in the sanctity of anointing. Only under this condition did the social order receive its justification.

But since this is not so, and, on the contrary, people who have authority, precisely because of possessing authority, are always not holy, the social order founded on authority could no longer have any justification.

Even if there was a time when, at a certain low level of morality and with the general inclination of people to violence against one another, the existence of an authority restraining this violence was profitable, that is, when the violence of the state was less than the violence of personalities against one another, it is impossible not to see that such an advantage of the state over its absence could not be permanent. The more the inclination of personalities to violence diminished, the more manners softened, and the more authority was corrupted through being unrestrained, the smaller and smaller this advantage became.

In this change in the relation between the moral development of the masses and the corruption of governments consists the whole history of the last two thousand years.

In its simplest form the thing happened like this: people lived in tribes, families, clans, and were at enmity, did violence to, ruined and killed one another. This violence took place on a small and a large scale: personality fought with personality, tribe with tribe, family with family, clan with clan, nation with nation. Larger, stronger aggregates took possession of weaker ones, and the larger and stronger an aggregate of people became, the less internal violence took place in it, and the more secure the duration of the life of the aggregate seemed.

The members of a tribe or a family, joining in one aggregate, are less at enmity among themselves, and the tribe and the family do not die like a single person but continue their existence; among the members of one state, subject to one authority, the struggle seems still weaker, and the life of the state seems still more secure.

These joinings into larger and larger aggregates took place not because people consciously recognized such joinings as more profitable for themselves, as is described in the fable of the calling of the Varangians, but as a consequence, on the one hand, of natural growth, and on the other, of struggle and conquests.

When conquest has already been accomplished, the authority of the conqueror does indeed stop internal strife, and the social understanding of life receives confirmation. But this confirmation is only temporary. Internal strife stops only in the measure in which the pressure of authority on the personalities that were formerly at enmity with one another increases. The violence of internal struggle, abolished by authority, is born in authority itself. Authority is in the hands of people like everyone else, that is, such as are always or often ready to sacrifice the common good for their personal good, with only this difference: that these people have no restraining force of resistance from those they do violence to, and are subject to the whole corrupting influence of authority. And therefore the evil of violence, passing into the hands of authority, always grows and grows, and becomes in time greater than the one it is supposed to abolish, while in the members of society the inclination to violence grows weaker and weaker, and the violence of authority becomes less and less necessary.

State authority, even if it abolishes internal violence, always brings new violence into people's lives, and always greater and greater, in the measure of its duration and its growth in strength.

So that though in the state the violence of authority is less noticeable than the violence of members of society against one another, since it is expressed not in struggle but in submission, the violence nonetheless exists, and for the most part in a stronger degree than before. And it cannot be otherwise, because, besides the fact that possession of authority corrupts people, the calculation, or even the unconscious striving, of those who do violence will always consist in bringing those to whom violence is done to the greatest weakening, since the weaker the one to whom violence is done, the less effort will be needed to hold him down.

And therefore the violence over the one to whom violence is done always grows up to the last limit it can reach without killing the hen that lays the golden eggs. And if this hen does not lay, like the American Indians, the Fijians, the Negroes, then they are killed, in spite of the sincere protests of philanthropists against such a mode of action.

The best confirmation of this is the position of the working classes of our time, who in reality are nothing other than conquered people.

In spite of all the pretended efforts of the upper classes to ease the position of the workers, all the workers of our world are subject to an unchanging iron law, according to which they have only as much as they need in order to be constantly driven by need to work and to be strong enough to work for their masters, that is, the conquerors.

So it has always been. Always, in the measure of the duration and growth of authority, its advantages for those who submitted to it were lost and its disadvantages increased.

So it was and is, independently of the forms of government under which nations lived. The difference is only that under the despotic form of government authority is concentrated in a small number of those who do violence, and the form of violence is sharper; under constitutional monarchies and republics, as in France and America, authority is distributed among a larger number of those who do violence, and the forms of its expression are less sharp; but the business of violence, in which the disadvantages of authority are greater than its advantages, and its process, which brings those it is done to to the last limit of weakening to which they can be brought for the profit of those who do it, are always one and the same.

Such was and is the position of all those to whom violence is done; but until now they did not know this, and in most cases naïvely believed that governments exist for their good; that without governments they would perish; that the thought that people can live without governments is a blasphemy which must not even be uttered; that this is the — for some reason terrible — teaching of anarchism, with which the idea of every kind of horror is connected.

People believed, as something fully proved and therefore needing no proof, that since until now all nations had developed in the state form, this form is forever the necessary condition of the development of humanity.

So it went on for hundreds, thousands of years, and governments, that is, the people in authority, tried, and now try more and more, to keep the nations in this error.

So it was under the Roman emperors, so it is now. In spite of the fact that the thought of the uselessness and even the harm of state violence enters more and more into people's consciousness, it would go on so forever, were it not necessary for governments, in order to maintain their authority, to strengthen their armies.

It is usually thought that armies are strengthened by governments only for the defense of the state against other states, forgetting that armies are needed by governments above all for defending themselves against their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.

This was always needed, and became more and more needed in the measure of the developing education of the nations, in the measure of the growth of communication among people of one and of different nationalities, and has become especially necessary now, with the communist, socialist, anarchist and general workers' movement. And governments feel this and increase their chief force, the disciplined army.¹⁴

Not long ago in the German Reichstag, answering a question as to why money was needed to raise the pay of non-commissioned officers, the German chancellor declared outright that reliable non-commissioned officers are needed in order to fight against socialism. Caprivi said aloud only what everyone knows, though it is carefully hidden from the nations; he said why guards of Swiss and Scots were hired by French kings and popes, why in Russia the recruits are carefully shuffled so that the regiments stationed in the center are made up of recruits from the borderlands, and the regiments in the borderlands of men from the center of Russia. The meaning of Caprivi's speech, translated into simple language, is that the money is needed not for resisting external enemies, but for bribing non-commissioned officers so that they will be ready to act against the oppressed working people.

Caprivi inadvertently said what everyone knows very well, or, if he does not know it, feels: namely, that the existing order of life is as it is not because it must naturally be so, not because the people want it to be so, but because it is maintained so by the violence of governments, by the army with its bribed non-commissioned officers and generals.

If a working man has no land, no possibility of using the most natural right of every person — to draw from the land the means of subsistence for himself and his family — this is not because the people want it, but because certain people, landowners, have been granted the right to admit or not admit working people to this. And this unnatural order is maintained by the army. If the enormous riches accumulated by the workers are considered to belong not to all but to exceptional persons; if the authority to collect taxes from labor and to use this money for whatever they find necessary has been granted to certain people; if strikes of workers are resisted and strikes of capitalists encouraged; if certain people are granted the choice of the method of religious and civic instruction and upbringing of children; if certain persons are granted the right to make laws which everyone must obey, and to dispose of people's property and lives — then all this happens not because the people want it and because it must naturally be so, but because governments and the ruling classes want it for their own profit and establish it by means of physical violence over people's bodies.

Everyone, if he does not yet know this, will learn it at any attempt at non-submission to, or change of, such an order of things. And therefore armies are needed by every government and the ruling classes above all to maintain that order of things which not only does not follow from the needs of the people, but is often directly opposed to them, and is profitable only to the government and the ruling classes.

Armies are needed by every government above all for keeping its subjects in submission and for using their labor. But the government is not alone: next to it there is another government, which likewise uses its subjects by violence and is always ready to take from the other government the labor of its already enslaved subjects. And therefore every government needs an army not only for internal use, but also for guarding its booty from neighboring predators. Every state is in consequence involuntarily brought to the necessity of increasing its armies in rivalry with the others. And the increase of armies is contagious, as Montesquieu noted 150 years ago.

Every increase of the army in one state, directed against its own subjects, becomes dangerous to its neighbor too, and calls forth an increase in the neighboring states as well.

Armies have grown to the millions to which they have now grown not only because states were threatened by neighbors; this happened above all because all attempts at rebellion by subjects must be suppressed. The increase of armies comes simultaneously from two causes that call each other forth: armies are needed both against one's internal enemies and in order to defend one's position against neighbors. The one conditions the other. The despotism of a government always increases with the increase and strengthening of armies and with external successes, and the aggressiveness of governments increases with the strengthening of internal despotism.

As a consequence of this the European governments, in rivalry with one another, strengthening and strengthening their armies, came to an inevitable necessity — universal military service — since universal military service was the means of getting the greatest quantity of troops in time of war at the least expense. Germany was the first to think of doing this. And as soon as one state did it, the others had to do the same. And as soon as this was done, the result was that all citizens stood under arms in order to maintain all those injustices which were committed against them; the result was that all citizens became the oppressors of themselves.

Universal military service was an inevitable logical necessity which could not but be arrived at; but at the same time it is the last expression of the inner contradiction of the social understanding of life, which arose when violence became needed to maintain it. In universal military service this contradiction became obvious. Indeed: the meaning of the social understanding of life consists in this, that a person, conscious of the cruelty of the struggle of personalities among themselves and of the perishability of the personality itself, carries the meaning of his life over into an aggregate of personalities. But with universal military service it comes out that people, having made all the sacrifices demanded of them in order to rid themselves of the cruelty of struggle and the insecurity of life, are, after all the sacrifices they have made, called again to all those dangers they thought they had rid themselves of; and besides, that aggregate — the state — in whose name the personalities renounced their advantages, is again exposed to the same danger of destruction to which the personality itself was formerly exposed.

Governments were to rid people of the cruelty of the struggle of personalities and give them the certainty that the order of state life would not be violated; and instead of this they lay on the personality the necessity of the same struggle, only moving it from struggle with the nearest personalities to struggle with the personalities of other states, and leave the same danger of destruction both for the personality and for the state.

The institution of universal military service is like what would happen to a man propping up a house that is falling down: the walls leaned inward — props were put up; the ceiling sagged — others were put up; between the props the boards sagged — still more props were put up. It came to the point that the props, though they hold up the house, make it impossible to live in the house because of the props.

The same with universal military service. Universal military service destroys all those advantages of social life which it is called on to protect.

The advantages of social life consist in the security of property and labor and in furthering the common improvement of life — universal military service destroys all this.

The taxes collected from the people for preparation for war swallow the greater share of the products of labor which the army is supposed to protect.

The tearing of all men away from the ordinary course of life disturbs the possibility of labor itself.

The threats of war, ready to break out any minute, make all the improvements of social life useless and vain.

If formerly a person was told that without submission to the authority of the state he would be exposed to the attacks of evil people, internal and external enemies, would be forced to fight them himself, to be exposed to murder, that therefore it was profitable for him to bear some privations to rid himself of these misfortunes, then a person could believe this, since the sacrifices he made to the state were only partial sacrifices and gave him the hope of a peaceful life in an indestructible state, in whose name he made his sacrifices. But now, when these sacrifices have not only grown tenfold, but the advantages promised him are absent, it is natural for everyone to think that his submission to authority is completely useless.

But the fatal significance of universal military service, as a manifestation of the contradiction contained in the social understanding of life, does not lie in this alone. The chief manifestation of this contradiction lies in this: that with universal military service every citizen, becoming a soldier, becomes a supporter of the state order and a participant in everything the state does, and whose lawfulness he does not recognize.

Governments assert that armies are needed chiefly for external defense, but this is wrong. They are needed above all against their own subjects, and every person serving his military service involuntarily becomes a participant in all the violence of the state over its subjects.

To convince oneself that every person who carries out military service becomes a participant in such deeds of the state as he does not and cannot recognize, let everyone only recall what is done in every state in the name of order and the good of the nations, and of which the army is always the executor. All the dynastic struggles and those of various parties, all the executions connected with these troubles, all the suppressions of uprisings, all the uses of military force for dispersing crowds of people, suppressing strikes, all the extortion of taxes, all the injustices of the distribution of landed property, all the restrictions on labor — all this is done, if not directly by troops, then by the police, supported by troops. The one who serves his military service becomes a participant in all these deeds — deeds in some cases doubtful to him, but in many cases directly contrary to his conscience. People do not want to leave the land they have worked for generations; people do not want to disperse as the government demands; people do not want to pay the taxes demanded of them; people do not want to recognize as binding on themselves laws which they did not make; people do not want to be deprived of their nationality — and I, carrying out my military service, must come and beat these people. I cannot, being a participant in these deeds, help asking myself whether these deeds are good? And whether I ought to assist in carrying them out?

Universal military service is for governments the last degree of violence, necessary for maintaining the whole building; and for subjects it is the last limit of the possibility of obedience. It is the keystone in the vault, which holds the walls and whose removal brings down the whole building.

The time has come when the ever-growing abuses of governments and their struggle among themselves have brought it about that such sacrifices — not only material but moral — are demanded of every subject, at which everyone has had to stop and think and ask himself: can I make these sacrifices? And in the name of what must I make these sacrifices? These sacrifices are demanded in the name of the state. In the name of the state there is demanded of me the renunciation of everything that can be dear to a person: peace, family, security, human dignity. What then is this state, for which such terrible sacrifices are demanded? And why is it so indispensably necessary?

"The state," we are told, "is indispensably necessary, first, because without the state I and all of us would not be protected from the violence and attacks of evil people; second, without the state we would be savages and would have no religious, educational, upbringing, commercial, communication or other social institutions; and third, because without the state we would be exposed to enslavement by neighboring nations."

"Without the state," we are told, "we would be exposed to the violence and attacks of evil people in our own fatherland."

But who among us are these evil people, from whose violence and attacks the state and its army save us? If three or four centuries ago, when people were proud of their military art and their weapons, when killing people was considered valor, there were such people, then now there are no such people, and all the people of our time do not use or carry weapons, and all, professing the rules of love of humanity and compassion for their neighbors, want the same as we do — only the possibility of a quiet and peaceful life. So that now there are no longer those special violent men from whom the state could defend us. And if by the people from whose attacks the state saves us we mean those people who commit crimes, then we know that these are not special beings, like beasts of prey among sheep, but are people like all of us, and just as little fond of committing crimes as those against whom they commit them. We know now that threats and punishments cannot reduce the number of such people, and that it is reduced only by a change of surroundings and by moral influence on people. So that the explanation of the necessity of state violence by the protection of people from violent men, if it had grounds three or four centuries ago, now has none. Now rather the opposite may be said: that the activity of governments, with their cruel methods of punishment — prisons, penal servitude, gallows, guillotines — which lag behind the general level of morality, contributes rather to the coarsening of nations than to their softening, and therefore rather to the increase than to the decrease of the number of violent men.

"Without the state," they say further, "there would not be all those institutions of upbringing, education, religion, communication and others. Without the state people would not know how to set up the social undertakings needed by all." But this argument too could have had grounds only some centuries ago.

If there was a time when people were so separated from one another, when the means of drawing together and of passing on thoughts were so little developed, that they could not come to terms and agree in any common undertaking — commercial, economic or educational — without a state center, now this separation no longer exists. The widely developed means of communication and of passing on thoughts have brought it about that, for forming societies, meetings, corporations, congresses, and scientific, economic and political institutions, the people of our time not only can fully do without governments, but that governments in most cases hinder rather than help the reaching of these aims.

Since the end of the last century hardly a single step forward of humanity has been not only not encouraged, but has always been held back by the government. So it was with the abolition of corporal punishment, torture, slavery, and with the establishment of freedom of the press and of assembly. And in our time state authority and governments not only do not help, but directly hinder all that activity by means of which people work out new forms of life for themselves. The resolutions of the labor, land, political and religious questions are not only not encouraged, but directly held back by state authority.

"Without the state and the government the nations would be enslaved by their neighbors."

It is hardly necessary to answer this last argument as well. The answer is found in the argument itself.

Governments, as we are told, are necessary with their armies for defense against neighboring states that might enslave us. But all governments say this about one another, and at the same time we know that all the European nations profess the same principles of freedom and brotherhood and therefore need no defense against one another. And if we speak of defense against barbarians, then 0.001 of the troops now standing under arms is enough for that. So that it comes out the opposite of what is said: state authority not only does not save us from the danger of attack by neighbors, but, on the contrary, it is the very thing that produces the danger of attack.

So that for every person who, by means of military service, has been put in the necessity of thinking about the significance of the state, in whose name the sacrifice of his peace, security and life is demanded of him, it cannot help being clear that for these sacrifices there is in our time no longer any ground.

But it is not only that, reasoning theoretically, every person cannot help seeing that the sacrifices demanded by the state have no ground; even reasoning practically, that is, weighing all those hard conditions in which a person is placed by the state, everyone cannot help seeing that for himself personally the fulfillment of the demands of the state and the submitting of himself to military service is in most cases less profitable for him than refusing it.

If the majority of people prefer submission to non-submission, this happens not as a result of a sober weighing of advantages and disadvantages, but because people are drawn to submission by the hypnotization to which they are subjected in the process. In submitting, people merely give way to the demands put to them, without reasoning and without making an effort of will; for non-submission, independent reasoning and effort are needed, of which not everyone is capable. But if, leaving aside the moral significance of submission and non-submission, one takes account only of advantages, non-submission will in general always be more profitable than submission.

Whoever I may be, whether a person belonging to the well-off, oppressing classes, or to the working, oppressed ones, in either case the disadvantages of non-submission are less than the disadvantages of submission, and the advantages of non-submission greater than the advantages of submission.

If I belong to the minority of oppressors, the disadvantages of non-submission to the demands of the government will consist in this: that I, as one who has refused to carry out the demands of the government, will be tried, and at best will either be acquitted, or, as is done with us with the Mennonites, made to serve my term of service on non-military work; and at worst will be sentenced to exile or to imprisonment for two or three years (I speak from examples that have occurred in Russia), or perhaps to a longer imprisonment, perhaps even to execution, though the likelihood of such a punishment is very small.

Such are the disadvantages of non-submission. And the disadvantages of submission will consist in the following: at best, I will not be sent to murder people, and I myself will not be exposed to great likelihoods of mutilation and death, but will only be enrolled in military slavery: I will be dressed in a clown's costume, every person above me in rank, from corporal to field marshal, will order me about, they will make me twist my body as they please, and, having kept me from one to five years, they will leave me for ten years in a state of readiness to appear again at any minute to carry out all these things. At worst, it will be that, under all the same former conditions of slavery, I will also be sent to war, where I will be forced to kill people of foreign nations who have done me no harm, where I may be mutilated and killed, and where I may get into such a place as happened at Sevastopol and happens in every war, where people are sent to certain death; and, what is most tormenting of all, I may be sent against my own fellow countrymen and will have to kill my brothers for dynastic or completely alien government interests. Such are the comparative disadvantages.

And the comparative advantages of submission and non-submission are the following.

For the one who has not refused, the advantages will consist in this: that, having undergone all the humiliations and carried out all the cruelties demanded of him, he may, if he is not killed, receive red, gold, tinsel decorations for his clown's costume; he may at best command hundreds of thousands of people as brutalized as himself, and be called a field marshal, and receive a lot of money.

And the advantages of the one who has refused will consist in this: that he will keep his human dignity, will receive the respect of good people, and, above all, will know without doubt that he is doing God's work, and therefore undoubted good to people.

Such are the advantages and disadvantages on both sides for a person of the rich classes, for an oppressor; for a person of the poor working class the advantages and disadvantages will be the same, but with an important addition to the disadvantages. The disadvantages for a person of the working class who has not refused military service will consist further in this: that, entering military service, he by his participation and, as it were, his consent, fastens down the oppression in which he himself finds himself.

But it is not considerations of how far the state, which people are called on to support by their participation in military service, is necessary and useful for them — still less considerations of the advantages and disadvantages for each of his submission or non-submission to the demands of the government — that decide the question of the necessity of the existence or the abolition of the state. This question is decided irrevocably and without appeal by the religious consciousness or conscience of each separate person, before whom, with universal military service, the question of the existence or non-existence of the state involuntarily arises.

VIII

THE INEVITABILITY OF THE ACCEPTANCE BY THE PEOPLE OF OUR WORLD OF THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING OF NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL BY VIOLENCE

Christianity is not legislation but a new understanding of life, and therefore it was not binding and was not accepted by all people in its whole significance, but only by a few, while the rest accepted it in a distorted form. Christianity, besides, is a prophecy of the ruinousness of pagan life and therefore of the necessity of accepting the Christian teaching. Non-resistance to evil by violence is one of the sides of the Christian teaching which in our time must inevitably be accepted by people. Two ways of resolving every struggle. The first way consists in finding general definitions of evil, binding on all, and fighting this evil by violence. The second way — the Christian — consists in not fighting evil by violence at all. Though the failure of the first way was already recognized in the first centuries of Christianity, it went on being applied, and only as humanity moved on did it become ever more obvious that there is not and cannot be a general definition of evil. Now this is obvious to all, and if violence intended for fighting evil exists, it is not because it is still considered necessary, but because people do not know how to rid themselves of it. The difficulty of getting rid of it depends on the cunning and complexity of state violence. This violence is maintained by 4 means: intimidation, bribery, hypnotization and the application of military force. Deliverance from state violence cannot come about through the overthrow of state authority. People have been brought by the calamity of pagan life to the necessity of recognizing the teaching of Christ, which they had passed by, with its non-resistance to evil. The consciousness of its truth, spread in our world, also leads to the same necessity of accepting the Christian teaching. This consciousness is in complete contradiction with our life, which is especially obvious in universal military service; but people, as a consequence of habit and of the action of the 4 means of state violence, do not see this contradiction between Christianity and the duties of a soldier. People do not see it even when the authorities themselves show them with complete obviousness all the immorality of the duties of a soldier. The call to military service is the extreme test for every person, the offer of a choice between accepting the Christian teaching of non-resistance and slavish submission to the existing state order. People usually, renouncing everything holy, submit to the demands of the state order and seem to see no other way out. For people of the pagan understanding of life there is no other way out, and there will be none, in spite of all the still more terrible calamities of war. A society made of such people must perish, and no social reconstructions will save it. Pagan life has reached its last limits — it is destroying itself.

It is often said that if Christianity is the truth, it ought to have been accepted by all people at the time it appeared, and ought then to have changed people's life and made it better. But to say this is the same as to say that if a seed were able to sprout, it ought at once to give shoot, flower and fruit.

The Christian teaching is not legislation which, introduced by violence, can at once change people's life. Christianity is a new, higher understanding of life, different from the former one. And a new understanding of life cannot be prescribed; it can only be freely taken in.

And a new understanding of life can be freely taken in only in two ways: the spiritual — inward — and the experimental — outward.

Some people — a minority — at once, by a prophetic feeling, point to the truth of the teaching, give themselves to it and fulfill it. Others — the majority — are brought to the knowledge of the truth of the teaching and of the necessity of taking it in only by a long path of errors, experiments and sufferings.

And it is to this necessity of taking in the teaching in the experimental, outward way that the whole majority of the people of Christian humanity has now been brought.

Sometimes one thinks: why was that distortion of Christianity necessary which even now hinders more than anything else its acceptance in its true meaning? And yet this very distortion of Christianity, having brought people to the position in which they now are, was the necessary condition for the majority of people to be able to receive it in its true meaning.

If Christianity had been offered to people in its true and not in a distorted form, it would not have been accepted by the majority of people, and this majority would have remained alien to it, as the nations of Asia are alien to it now. But having accepted it in a distorted form, the nations that accepted it were subjected to its slow but sure action, and by a long, experimental path of errors and of the sufferings that follow from them have now been brought to the necessity of taking it in in its true meaning.

The distortion of Christianity and its acceptance in a distorted form by the majority of people was as necessary as it is that, in order for it to come up, the sown seed should for a time be hidden by the earth.

The Christian teaching is a teaching of truth and at the same time a prophecy.

Eighteen hundred years ago the Christian teaching revealed to people the truth about how they ought to live, and at the same time foretold what human life would be if people did not live so but went on living by the foundations by which they lived before it, and what it would be if they accepted the Christian teaching and fulfilled it in life.

Having given in the Sermon on the Mount the teaching that is to guide people's life, Christ said: "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and does them I will liken to a wise man, who built his house on the rock; and the rain fell, and the rivers overflowed, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, because it was founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man, who built his house on the sand; and the rain fell, and the rivers overflowed, and the winds blew and pressed on that house; and it fell, and great was its fall" (Matt. VII, 24–27).

And now, after 18 centuries, the prophecy has been fulfilled. Not following Christ's teaching in general, and its manifestation in social life as non-resistance to evil, people have involuntarily come to that position of inevitable ruin which Christ promised to those who would not follow his teaching.

People often think that the question of resistance or non-resistance to evil by violence is an invented question, a question that can be passed by. And yet it is a question put by life itself before all people and before every thinking person, and inevitably demanding its resolution. This question, for people in their social life, ever since the Christian teaching was preached, is the same as the question, for a traveler, of which of two roads to take when he comes to a fork in the way he has been going. He must go on, and he cannot say: I will not think, and will go as I went before. Before there was one road, and now there are two, and one cannot go as before, but must inevitably choose one of the two.

In exactly the same way, ever since Christ's teaching became known to people, one cannot say: I will live as I lived before, without resolving the question of resistance or non-resistance to evil by violence. At the rise of every struggle one must inevitably decide: shall I resist by violence, or not resist, what I consider evil — violence?

The question of resistance or non-resistance to evil by violence arose when the first struggle between people appeared, since every struggle is nothing other than resistance by violence to what each of those struggling considers evil. But people before Christ did not see that resistance by violence to what each considers evil — only because he considers evil what another considers good — is only one of the ways of resolving a struggle, and that the other way consists in not resisting evil by violence at all.

Before Christ's teaching it seemed to people that there is only one way of resolving a struggle — by means of resisting evil by violence — and so they acted, each of those struggling trying meanwhile to convince himself and others that what each considers evil is the real, absolute evil.

And for this, from the most ancient times, people began to invent such definitions of evil as would be binding on all. And as such definitions of evil, binding on all, there were put forward now the decrees of laws which were supposed to have been received in a supernatural way, now the commands of people or assemblies of people to whom the property of infallibility was ascribed. People used violence against other people and assured themselves and others that they were using this violence against an evil recognized by all.

This means was used from the most ancient times especially by those people who had seized power, and for a long time people did not see the unreasonableness of this means.

But the longer people lived, the more complex their relations became, the more obvious it became that to resist by violence what each considers evil is unreasonable, that struggle is not reduced by it, and that no human definitions can bring it about that what is considered evil by some people should be considered so by others too.

Already at the time of the appearance of Christianity, in the place where it appeared, in the Roman Empire, it was clear to a great number of people that what Nero and Caligula considered evil, which must be resisted by violence, cannot be considered evil by other people. Already then people were beginning to understand that human laws, put forward as divine laws, are written by people, that people cannot be infallible, whatever outward greatness they may be clothed with, and that erring people will not become infallible because they gather together and call themselves a senate or by some other such name. Already then this was felt and understood by many. And it was then that Christ preached his teaching, which consisted not only in this, that one must not resist evil by violence, but was a teaching about a new understanding of life, a part, or rather an application, of which to social life was the teaching about the means of abolishing the struggle among all people — not by obliging only one part of people to submit without struggle to what certain authorities would prescribe to them, but by no one — and consequently also those (and chiefly those) who rule — using violence against anyone in any case.

This teaching was accepted then only by the very smallest number of disciples; while the majority of people, and especially all those who ruled over people, even after the nominal acceptance of Christianity, went on holding for themselves to the rule of resisting by violence what they considered evil. So it went under the Roman and Byzantine emperors, so it continued afterward.

The insufficiency of the principle of an authoritative definition of what is evil and of resisting it by violence, already obvious in the first centuries of Christianity, became still more obvious with the breaking up of the Roman Empire into many states with equal rights, with their enmity among themselves, and with the internal struggle that went on within the states.

But people were not ready to accept the resolution given by Christ, and the former means of defining the evil that must be resisted, by establishing laws binding on all and carried out by force, went on being applied. The judge of what was to be considered evil and resisted by violence was now the Pope, now the emperor, now the king, now an assembly of elected men, now the whole people. But both inside and outside the state there were always people who did not recognize as binding on themselves either the decrees put forward as the command of the deity, or the decrees of people clothed with holiness, or the institutions that were to represent the will of the people; and people who considered good what the existing authorities considered evil fought against the authorities with the same violence that was used against them.

People clothed with holiness considered evil what people and institutions clothed with secular authority considered good, and the reverse; and the struggle became more and more cruel. And the longer people held to such a way of resolving struggle, the more obvious it became that this way is no good, because there is not and cannot be such an outward authority for defining evil as would be recognized by all.

So it went on for 18 centuries, and came to what it has come to now — to the complete obviousness of the fact that there is not and cannot be an outward definition of evil binding on all. It has come to this, that people have stopped not only believing in the possibility of finding this general definition, binding on all, but have stopped believing even in the necessity of putting forward such a definition. It has come to this, that people who have power have stopped proving that what they consider evil is evil, but have begun saying outright that they consider evil what they do not like; and people who obey power have begun to obey it no longer because they believe that the definitions of evil given by this power are just, but only because they cannot help obeying. It is not because it is good, needful and useful to people, and the opposite of it evil, that Nice was annexed to France, Lorraine to Germany, Bohemia to Austria; that Poland was divided; that Ireland and India are subject to English rule; that war is made on China and Africans are killed; that the Americans drive out the Chinese and the Russians oppress the Jews; that landowners use land they do not work, and capitalists the products of labor done by others — but only because those who have power want it to be so. What exists now has come about: some people commit violence no longer in the name of resisting evil, but in the name of their profit or whim, and other people submit to violence not because they consider, as was formerly supposed, that violence is done to them in the name of delivering them from evil and for their good, but only because they cannot rid themselves of violence.

If the Roman, the medieval man, our Russian man as I remember him fifty years ago, was undoubtedly convinced that the existing violence of authority was indispensably necessary to deliver him from evil, that taxes, levies, serfdom, prisons, lashes, knouts, penal servitude, executions, soldiering, wars must be so — now one will rarely find a person who would not only believe that all the violence being done delivers anyone from any evil, but who would not see clearly that the majority of the acts of violence to which he is subject and in which he partly takes part are in themselves a great and useless evil.

There is now no person who would not see not only the uselessness but the absurdity of collecting taxes from the laboring people to enrich idle officials; or the senselessness of imposing punishments on corrupted and weak people in the form of exile from one place to another or of imprisonment in prisons, where, living in security and idleness, they only become still more corrupted and weak; or — no longer only the uselessness and absurdity, but the outright madness and cruelty — of military preparations and wars, which ruin and destroy the people and have no explanation or justification; and yet these acts of violence go on and are even supported by those very people who see their uselessness, absurdity and cruelty and suffer from them.

If fifty years ago the rich, idle man and the working, illiterate man were both equally sure that their position — of eternal holiday for the one and eternal labor for the other — was determined by God himself, now not only in Europe, but in Russia too, thanks to movements of population, the spread of literacy and printing, it is hard to find among the rich and among the poor a person in whom doubt about the justice of such an order has not taken root from one side or the other. Not only do the rich know that they are guilty by the mere fact of being rich, and try to atone for their guilt, as sins were formerly atoned for by gifts to churches, by gifts to science or art; but the greater half of the working people now openly recognize the existing order as false and due to be abolished or changed. Some people, the religious, of whom we have millions in Russia, the so-called sectarians, recognize this order as false and due to be abolished on the ground of the Gospel teaching understood in its real meaning; others consider it false on the ground of socialist, communist, anarchist theories, which have now penetrated even into the lower layers of the working people.

Violence holds now no longer because it is considered necessary, but only because it has existed for a long time, and is so organized by the people to whom it is profitable — that is, by governments and the ruling classes — that the people who are under their power cannot break out from under it.

Governments in our time — all governments, the most despotic as well as the liberal — have become what Herzen so aptly called Genghis Khan with telegraphs, that is, organizations of violence having nothing at their base but the crudest arbitrariness, and at the same time using all those means which science has worked out for the common, social, peaceful activity of free and equal people, and which they use for enslaving and oppressing people.

Governments and the ruling classes rest now not on right, not even on a semblance of justice, but on such an artful organization, with the help of the improvements of science, that all people are caught in a circle of violence from which there is no possibility of breaking out. This circle is made up now of four means of acting on people. These means are all bound together and support one another, like the links of a chain joined in a ring.

The first, oldest means is the means of intimidation. This means consists in presenting the existing state order (whatever it may be — a free republican or the most savage despotic) as something sacred and unchangeable, and therefore punishing with the cruelest punishments all attempts to change it. This means, as it was used before, is used now unchangingly wherever there are governments: in Russia against the so-called nihilists, in America against the anarchists, in France against the imperialists, monarchists, communards and anarchists. Railways, telegraphs, telephones, photographs and the improved method of removing people forever without killing them into solitary confinement, where, hidden from people, they perish and are forgotten, and many other of the newest inventions, which governments use above all others, give them such power that, once power has fallen into certain hands, and the police, open and secret, and the administration, and all kinds of prosecutors, jailers and executioners work zealously, there is no possibility of overthrowing a government, however mad and cruel it may be.

The second means is the means of bribery. It consists in taking from the laboring working people their wealth by means of money taxes, and distributing this wealth among officials, who are obliged for this reward to maintain and strengthen the enslavement of the people.

These bribed officials, from the highest ministers to the lowest clerks, making up one unbroken net of people bound by one and the same interest of feeding themselves on the labor of the people, enriched the more the more submissively they carry out the will of governments, always and everywhere, stopping at no means, in all branches of activity defend by word and deed the government violence on which their well-being is founded.

The third means is what I cannot call otherwise than the hypnotization of the people. This means consists in holding back the spiritual development of people and by various suggestions keeping them in an understanding of life already outlived by humanity, on which the power of governments rests. This hypnotization is at present organized in the most complex way, and, beginning its action in childhood, continues over people until their death. This hypnotization begins at the earliest age in compulsory schools set up on purpose for it, in which children are inspired with views of the world proper to their ancestors and directly contrary to the present consciousness of humanity. In countries where there is a state religion, children are taught the senseless blasphemies of church catechisms, with the pointing out of the necessity of obeying the authorities; in republican states they are taught the savage superstition of patriotism and the same supposed obligation of obeying governments. In older years this hypnotization is continued over people by encouraging both religious and patriotic superstition. Religious superstition is encouraged by the building, with means collected from the people, of temples, processions, monuments, festivals, with the help of painting, architecture, music, incense, which stupefy the people, and above all by the maintaining of the so-called clergy, whose duty consists in befogging people by their performances, the pathos of services, sermons, their interference in people's private life — at births, at marriages, at deaths — and keeping them in a constant state of stupefaction. Patriotic superstition is encouraged by governments and the ruling classes by setting up, with means collected from the people, public celebrations, spectacles, monuments, festivals, which dispose people to recognize the exceptional importance of their own nation alone and the greatness of their own state alone and of its rulers, and to ill will and even hatred toward other nations. At the same time despotic governments directly forbid the printing and spreading of books and the making of speeches that enlighten the people, and exile or lock up all people who might wake the people from their sleep; besides this, all governments without exception hide from the people everything that might free them, and encourage everything that corrupts them, such as: writing that keeps the people in the savagery of religious and patriotic superstitions, all kinds of sensual amusements, spectacles, circuses, theaters, and all kinds even of physical means of stupefaction, such as tobacco and vodka, which make up the chief revenue of states; even prostitution is encouraged, which is not only recognized but organized by the majority of governments. Such is the third means.

The fourth means consists in this: by means of the three preceding means, to pick out from all the people thus fettered and stupefied a further part of people, in order, by subjecting these people to special, intensified methods of stupefaction and brutalization, to make of them will-less instruments of all those cruelties and brutalities which the government will need. This stupefaction and brutalization is achieved by taking these people at that youthful age when no clear notions of morality have yet had time to form firmly in them, and, removing them from all the natural human conditions of life — home, family, homeland, reasonable labor — locking them up together in barracks, dressing them in special clothes, and making them, under the action of shouts, drums, music, shining objects, perform every day certain movements devised for the purpose; and by these methods bringing them into such a state of hypnosis that they cease to be people and become senseless machines, submissive to the hypnotizer. These hypnotized, physically strong young people (now, with universal military service, all young people), supplied with instruments of murder, always submissive to the power of the government and ready at its order for any violence, make up the fourth and chief means of enslaving people.

With this means the circle of violence is closed.

Intimidation, bribery and hypnotization bring people to go for soldiers; and the soldiers give the power and the possibility both to punish people and to fleece them (bribing officials with this money), and to hypnotize them, and to recruit them into those very soldiers who give the power to do all this.

The circle is closed, and there is no possibility of breaking out of it by force.

If some people assert that deliverance from violence, or at least its weakening, can come about through the oppressed people, having overthrown by force the oppressing government, replacing it with a new one, under which such violence and enslavement of people will no longer be needed, and if some people try to do this, these people only deceive themselves and others, and by this do not improve but only worsen the position of people. The activity of these people only strengthens the despotism of governments. The attempts of these people at liberation only give governments a convenient pretext for strengthening their power, and call forth its strengthening.

Even if one allows that, as a consequence of circumstances that have turned out especially unfavorable for a government — as, for example, in France in 1870 — some government were overthrown by force and power passed into other hands, this new power would in no case be less oppressive than the former, but always, on the contrary, defending itself against all its embittered, overthrown enemies, would be more despotic and cruel than the former, as indeed it was in all revolutions.

If socialists and communists consider the individualist capitalist order of society an evil, and anarchists consider government itself an evil, there are also monarchists, conservatives, capitalists, who consider the socialist and communist order and anarchy an evil; and all these parties have no means other than violence of uniting people. Whichever of these parties may triumph, to bring its orders into life, as well as to keep power, it must use not only all the existing means of violence but invent new ones too. Other people will be enslaved, and people will be compelled to other things, but there will be not only the same but a crueler violence and enslavement, because as a consequence of the struggle the hatred of people for one another will increase, and with it new means of enslavement will be strengthened and worked out.

So it has always been after all revolutions and all attempts at revolutions, all conspiracies, all violent changes of government. Every struggle only strengthens the means of enslavement of those who at the given time are in power.

The position of the people of our Christian world, and especially their most current ideals, prove this with striking convincingness.

There remains now only one sphere of human activity not seized by government power — the sphere of the family, the economic sphere, the sphere of private life and labor. And this sphere too, thanks to the struggle of the communists and socialists, is now little by little being seized by governments, so that labor and rest, the dwelling, clothing and food of people, all, little by little, if only the wishes of the reformers are fulfilled, will be determined and assigned by governments.

The whole long 1800-year course of the life of the Christian nations has inevitably brought them again to the necessity, which they had passed by, of deciding the question of accepting or not accepting Christ's teaching, and of the decision, following from it for social life, of the question of resistance or non-resistance to evil by violence — only with this difference, that formerly people could accept or not accept the decision given by Christianity, while now this decision has become inevitable, because it alone delivers them from that position of slavery in which they have entangled themselves as in a net.

But it is not only the calamity of people's position that brings them to this necessity.

Side by side with the negative proof of the falseness of the pagan order went also the positive proof of the truth of the Christian teaching.

Not in vain, in the course of 18 centuries, did the best people of all Christian humanity, having come to know the truths of the teaching by the inward, spiritual way, bear witness to them before people, in spite of all threats, privations, calamities and torments. These best people sealed the truth of the teaching by their martyrdom and handed it on to the masses.

Christianity penetrated into the consciousness of humanity not only by the negative way of proving the impossibility of continuing pagan life, but also by its simplification, its clarification, its being freed from the superstitions that had mixed with it, and by its spreading among all classes of the people.

Eighteen centuries of professing Christianity have not passed in vain for the people who accepted it, even if outwardly. These eighteen centuries have brought it about that now people, while continuing to live a pagan life which does not correspond to the age of humanity, not only see clearly all the calamity of the state they are in, but in the depth of their soul believe (they live only because they believe) that salvation from this state lies only in fulfilling the Christian teaching in its true meaning. How and when this salvation will come about, all people think differently, in accordance with their mental development and the current prejudices of their surroundings, but every person of our world recognizes that our salvation lies in fulfilling the Christian teaching. Some believing people, who recognize the Christian teaching as divine, consider that salvation will come when all people believe in Christ and the second coming draws near; others, who also recognize the divinity of Christ's teaching, consider that this salvation will come about through the church, which, having subjected all people to itself, will bring up Christian virtues in them and transform their life. A third group, who do not recognize Christ as God, consider that the salvation of people will come about through slow, gradual progress, in which the foundations of pagan life will be replaced little by little by the foundations of freedom, equality, brotherhood, that is, by Christian foundations; a fourth group, who preach social reconstruction, consider that salvation will come about when, by means of a violent upheaval, people will be compelled to community of property, absence of governments, collective rather than individual labor, that is, to the realization of one of the sides of the Christian teaching.

One way or another, all the people of our time in their consciousness not only reject the existing, outlived pagan order of life, but also recognize — often themselves not knowing it, and considering themselves enemies of Christianity — that our salvation lies only in the application to life of the Christian teaching, or a part of it, in its true meaning.

Christianity for the majority of people, as its teacher said, could not be realized at once, but had to grow, like the hugest tree, from the tiniest seed. And so it did grow, and has now grown up, if not yet in reality, then in the consciousness of the people of our time.

Now not only the minority of people, who always understood Christianity by the inward way, recognize it in its true meaning, but also all that enormous majority of people who in their social life seem so far removed from Christianity.

Look at the private life of individual people, listen to the judgments of actions which people make when they judge one another, listen not only to public sermons and speeches but to the instructions which parents and teachers give to those they bring up, and you will see that, however far the state, social, violence-bound life of people may be from the realization of Christian truths in private life, only Christian virtues are considered good by all and for all, without exception and beyond dispute; only antichristian vices are considered bad by all and for all, without exception and beyond dispute. The best people are considered those who selflessly devote their life to the service of humanity and sacrifice themselves for others; the worst are considered the selfish, who use the calamities of their neighbors for their personal profit.

If some non-Christian ideals — strength, courage, wealth — are still recognized by some people untouched by Christianity, these are ideals held and shared not by all and not by the people recognized as best. And ideals shared by all, always recognized as binding on all others, other than the Christian ones, there are none.

The position of our Christian humanity, if one looks at it from outside, with its cruelty and its enslavement of people, is truly terrible. But if one looks at it from the side of its consciousness, a completely different spectacle presents itself.

All the evil of our life seems to exist only because it has been done for a long time, and the people who do it have not yet had time, have not yet learned, to stop doing it; but all of them do not want to do it.

All this evil exists from some other cause, as though independent of the consciousness of people.

However strange and contradictory it seems, all the people of our time hate that very order of things which they themselves support.

It is Max Müller, I think, who tells of the amazement of an Indian converted to Christianity, who, having taken in the essence of the Christian teaching, came to Europe and saw the life of Christians. This man could not recover from his amazement at a reality completely opposite to the one he had expected to find among Christian nations.

If we are not amazed at the contradiction between our beliefs, convictions and actions, it happens only because the influences that hide this contradiction from people act on us too. One need only look at our life from the point of view of that Indian, who understood Christianity in its true meaning without any concessions or adaptations, and at the savage brutalities with which our life is filled, to be horrified at the contradictions among which we live, often without noticing them.

One need only recall the preparations for wars, the machine guns, silver-plated bullets, torpedoes — and the Red Cross; the building of solitary prisons, the experiments with electric executions — and concern for the well-being of prisoners; the philanthropic activity of the rich — and their life, which produces those poor whom they benefit. And these contradictions do not come about, as might seem, because people pretend to be Christians when they are pagans, but, on the contrary, because people lack something, or there is some force that hinders them from being what they already feel themselves to be in their consciousness and what they really want to be. The people of our time do not pretend when they say they hate oppression, inequality, the division of people, and every kind of cruelty not only to people but even to animals — they really hate all this, but do not know how to abolish it, or cannot bring themselves to part with what supports all this and seems to them necessary.

Indeed, ask each person of our time separately whether he considers it not only praiseworthy but worthy of a person of our time to occupy himself, receiving for it a salary out of proportion to the labor, with collecting from the people — often destitute — taxes in order with this money to build cannons, torpedoes and instruments of murder against people with whom we wish to be at peace and who wish the same with regard to us; or with devoting, again for a salary, his whole life to making these instruments of murder, or to preparing himself for murder and preparing people for it? And ask whether it is praiseworthy, and worthy of a person, and proper to a Christian, to occupy himself, again for money, with catching unhappy, strayed, often illiterate, drunken people because they appropriate others' property on a much smaller scale than we appropriate it, and kill people not in the way we are accustomed to do it, and for this putting them in prisons, tormenting and killing them? And whether it is praiseworthy, worthy of a person and a Christian, again for money, to preach to the people, instead of Christianity, superstitions known to be absurd and harmful? And whether it is praiseworthy, worthy of a person, to take from one's neighbor for one's whim what he needs to satisfy his first needs, as the large landowners do; or to make him bear labor beyond his strength that ruins his life, to increase one's wealth, as the factory owners and manufacturers do; or to use people's need to increase one's wealth, as merchants do? And each separately, especially if one is speaking of another, will say no. And at the same time the very same person who sees all the vileness of these acts himself, compelled by no one, sometimes even without the money profit of a salary, himself, of his own will, from childish vanity, for a porcelain trinket, a bit of ribbon, a bit of braid which he will be allowed to put on, himself of his own will goes into the military service, becomes an examining magistrate, a justice of the peace, a minister, a rural policeman, a bishop, a sexton — into posts in which he must do all these things, whose shamefulness and vileness he cannot help knowing.

I know that many of these people will prove with self-assurance that they consider their position not only lawful but necessary; they will say in their defense that the authorities are from God, that state posts are necessary for the good of humanity, that wealth is not contrary to Christianity, that the rich young man was told to give up his possessions only if he wanted to be perfect, that the present distribution of wealth and trade must be such and are profitable for all, and so on. But however they try to deceive themselves and others, all these people know that what they do is contrary to everything they believe in, in whose name they live; and in the depth of their soul, when they remain alone with their conscience, they are ashamed and pained to remember what they do, especially if the vileness of their activity has been pointed out to them. A person of our time, whether he professes the divinity of Christ or not, cannot help knowing that to take part — whether as tsar, minister, governor or rural policeman — in selling a poor family's last cow for taxes in order to give this money for cannons or for the salaries and pensions of luxurious, idle and harmful officials; or to take part in putting into prison the breadwinner of a family because we ourselves have corrupted him, and sending his family out to beg; or to take part in the robberies and murders of wars; or in instilling, instead of Christ's law, savage idolatrous superstitions; or to drive off into one's pound the cow, strayed onto one's land, of a man who has no land; or to deduct from a man working in a factory for an article he spoiled by accident; or to charge a poor man double for an article only because he is in extreme need — not one person of our time can help knowing that all these deeds are foul and shameful, and that they must not be done. And they all know this; they all know that what they do is bad, and would not for anything do it if they were able to stand against those forces which, closing their eyes to the criminality of their acts, draw them on to commit them.

Nowhere is the degree of contradiction which the life of the people of our time has reached seen so strikingly as in that very phenomenon which is the last means and expression of violence — universal military service.

It is only because this state of universal armament and military service came step by step, unnoticed, and because governments use for maintaining it all the means of intimidation, bribery, stupefaction and violence in their power, that we do not see the glaring contradiction of this state with those Christian feelings and thoughts with which all the people of our time are really imbued.

This contradiction has become so habitual to us that we do not even see all the terrifying senselessness and immorality of the acts not only of those people who of their own will choose the profession of murder as something honorable, but also of those unhappy people who agree to carry out military service, or even of those who, in countries where military service has not been introduced, voluntarily give their labor for hiring soldiers and for preparations for murder. All these people, whether Christians or people who profess humaneness and liberalism, know that by committing these acts they become participants — and with personal military service, perpetrators — of the most senseless, aimless, cruel murders, and yet they commit them.

But that is not all: in Germany, where universal military service itself came from, Caprivi expressed what had formerly been carefully hidden — that the people who will have to be killed are not only foreigners but their own, those very workers from whom the majority of soldiers are taken. And this admission did not open people's eyes, did not horrify them. And after it, as before, they go on going like sheep to the recruiting office and submitting to everything demanded of them.

But even that is not all: not long ago the German emperor explained still more exactly the significance and calling of the soldier, distinguishing, thanking and rewarding a soldier for having killed a defenseless prisoner who was trying to escape. Thanking and rewarding a person for an act always considered the meanest and lowest by people standing on the very lowest level of morality, William showed that the chief duty of a soldier, valued most of all by the authorities, consists in being an executioner — and not such a one as professional executioners, who kill only condemned criminals, but an executioner of all those innocent people whom his superiors order him to kill.

But even that is not all: in 1891 the same William, the enfant terrible of state power, who says aloud what others think, talking with some soldiers, said publicly the following, and the next day thousands of newspapers reprint these words:

"Recruits!" he says. "In sight of the altar and of the servant of God you have sworn fidelity to me. You are still too young to understand the true meaning of all that has been said here, but take care above all to follow always the orders and teachings given you. You have sworn fidelity to me; you are the children of my guard; that means that you are now my soldiers, that you have given yourselves to me soul and body. For you there is now one enemy, namely whoever is my enemy. With the present socialist intrigues it may happen that I order you to shoot at your own relatives, brothers, even parents — which God forbid — and then you are obliged to carry out my orders without a word."

This man expresses what all clever rulers know but carefully hide. He says outright that the people serving in the army serve him and his profit, and must be ready for his profit to kill their brothers and fathers.

He expresses outright, in the crudest words, all the horror of the crime for which people entering the soldiers are preparing, all the abyss of humiliation they reach in promising obedience. He, like a bold hypnotizer, tests the degree of sleep of the hypnotized subject: he puts red-hot iron to his body, the body hisses and smokes, but the sleeper does not wake.

This pitiful, sick man, crazed by power, insults with his words everything that can be holy for a person of our time; and people — Christians, liberals, the educated people of our time, all of them — not only are not indignant at this insult, but do not even notice it. The very last, extreme test is put to people in the crudest, sharpest form. And people seem not even to notice that this is a test, that a choice lies before them. It seems to them as if there is no choice at all, and there is only the one path of slavish submission. It would seem that these mad words, insulting everything a person of our time considers holy, ought to make people indignant, but nothing of the kind happens. All the young men of all Europe year after year are put to this test, and with the very smallest exceptions they all renounce everything that is and can be holy for a person, all express their readiness to kill their brothers, even their fathers, at the order of the first strayed person dressed in a livery trimmed with red and gold, and only ask whom and when they will be ordered to kill. And they are ready.

Every savage has something holy, for which he is ready to suffer but not to give way. But where is this holy thing in the person of our time? He is told: come into slavery to me, into such slavery that you will have to kill even your own father; and he, very often a learned man who has gone through all the sciences at the university, submissively puts his neck under the yoke. He is dressed in a clown's costume, ordered to jump, to twist about, to bow, to kill — he does it all submissively. And when he is let go, he returns as though nothing had happened to his former life and goes on talking about the dignity of man, freedom, equality and brotherhood.

"Yes, but what is one to do?" people often ask in sincere perplexity. "If everyone refused, then it would be so. But as it is — I alone will suffer and do no good to anyone or anything."

And it is true: a person of the social understanding of life cannot refuse. The meaning of his life is the good of his personality. For his personality it is better for him to submit, and he submits.

Whatever is done to him, however he is tormented, however humiliated, he will submit, because alone he can do nothing; he has not that foundation in whose name he could stand alone against violence. And those who govern them will never let them unite. It is often said that the invention of terrible military instruments of murder will abolish war; that war will abolish itself. This is not true. As the means of slaughtering people can be increased, so the means of bringing people of the social understanding of life to submission can be increased. Let them be killed by thousands, by millions, torn to pieces — some of them will still go, like senseless cattle, to the slaughter, because they are driven with a whip; others will go because for this they are allowed to put on bits of ribbon and braid, and will even be proud of it.

And it is with this body of people, stupefied to the point of promising to kill their parents, that the social leaders — conservatives, liberals, socialists, anarchists — discuss how to arrange a reasonable and moral society. But what reasonable and moral society can be arranged out of such people? As one cannot build a house out of rotten and crooked logs, however one rearranges them, so out of such people one cannot arrange a reasonable and moral society. Out of such people only a herd of animals can be formed, governed by the shouts and whips of herdsmen. And so it is.

And so, on the one side, people who are Christians by name, who profess freedom, equality, brotherhood, are alongside this ready, in the name of freedom, for the most slavish, humiliated submission; in the name of equality, for the sharpest and most senseless divisions of people, by outward signs only, into higher and lower, their allies and enemies; and in the name of brotherhood — ready to kill these brothers.¹⁵

The contradictions of consciousness, and in consequence the calamity of life, have reached the last degree, beyond which there is nowhere to go. Life built on the principles of violence has come to the denial of those very foundations in whose name it was set up. The ordering of society on the principles of violence, which had as its aim securing personal, family and social good, has brought people to the complete denial and destruction of these goods.

The first part of the prophecy has been fulfilled on the people and their generations who did not accept the teaching, and their descendants have now been brought to the necessity of testing the truth of its second part.