The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

are still worshiped by a few who have not been penetrated

by the Christian spirit, these ideals are out of date and are

abandoned, if not by all, at least by all those regarded as the

best people. There are no ideals, other than the Christian ideals,

which are accepted by all and regarded as binding on all.

 

The position of our Christian humanity, if you look at it from the

outside with all its cruelty and degradation of men, is terrible

indeed. But if one looks at it within, in its inner consciousness,

the spectacle it presents is absolutely different.

 

All the evil of our life seems to exist only because it has been

so for so long; those who do the evil have not had time yet to

learn how to act otherwise, though they do not want to act as they

do.

 

All the evil seems to exist through some cause independent of the

conscience of men.

 

Strange and contradictory as it seems, all men of the present day

hate the very social order they are themselves supporting.

 

I think it is Max M�ller who describes the amazement of an Indian

convert to Christianity, who after absorbing the essence of the

Christian doctrine came to Europe and saw the actual life of

Christians. He could not recover from his astonishment at the

complete contrast between the reality and what he had expected to

find among Christian nations. If we feel no astonishment at the

contrast between our convictions and our conduct, that is because

the influences, tending to obscure the contrast, produce an effect

upon us too. We need only look at our life from the point of view

of that Indian, who understood Christianity in its true

significance, without any compromises or concessions, we need but

look at the savage brutalities of which our life is full, to be

appalled at the contradictions in the midst of which we live often

without observing them.

 

We need only recall the preparations for war, the mitrailleuses,

the silver-gilt bullets, the torpedoes, and—the Red Cross; the

solitary prison cells, the experiments of execution by

electricity—and the care of the hygienic welfare of prisoners;

the philanthropy of the rich, and their life, which produces the

poor they are benefiting.

 

And these inconsistencies are not, as it might seem, because men

pretend to be Christians while they are really pagans, but because

of something lacking in men, or some kind of force hindering them

from being what they already feel themselves to be in their

consciousness, and what they genuinely wish to be. Men of the

present day do not merely pretend to hate oppression, inequality,

class distinction, and every kind of cruelty to animals as well as

human beings. They genuinely detest all this, but they do not

know how to put a stop to it, or perhaps cannot decide to give up

what preserves it all, and seems to them necessary.

 

Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and

worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he

receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the

people—often in poverty—taxes to be spent on constructing

cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to

make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel

the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting

one’s whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or

to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder. And ask

him whether it is laudable and worthy of a man, and suitable for a

Christian, to employ himself, for a salary, in seizing wretched,

misguided, often illiterate and drunken, creatures because they

appropriate the property of others—on a much smaller scale than

we do—or because they kill men in a different fashion from that

in which we undertake to do it—and shutting them in prison for

it, ill treating them and killing them; and whether it is laudable

and worthy of a man and a Christian to preach for a salary to the

people not Christianity, but superstitions which one knows to be

stupid and pernicious; and whether it is laudable and worthy of a

man to rob his neighbor for his gratification of what he wants to

satisfy his simplest needs, as the great landowners do; or to

force him to exhausting labor beyond his strength to augment one’s

wealth, as do factory owners and manufacturers; or to profit by

the poverty of men to increase one’s gains, as merchants do. And

everyone taken separately, especially if one’s remarks are

directed at someone else, not himself, will answer, No! And yet

the very man who sees all the baseness of those actions, of his

own free will, uncoerced by anyone, often even for no pecuniary

profit, but only from childish vanity, for a china cross, a scrap

of ribbon, a bit of fringe he is allowed to wear, will enter

military service, become a magistrate or justice of the peace,

commissioner, archbishop, or beadle, though in fulfilling these

offices he must commit acts the baseness and shamefulness of which

he cannot fail to recognize.

 

I know that many of these men will confidently try to prove that

they have reasons for regarding their position as legitimate and

quite indispensable. They will say in their defense that

authority is given by God, that the functions of the state are

indispensable for the welfare of humanity, that property is not

opposed to Christianity, that the rich young man was only

commanded to sell all he had and give to the poor if he wished to

be perfect, that the existing distribution of property and our

commercial system must always remain as they are, and are to the

advantage of all, and so on. But, however much they try to

deceive themselves and others, they all know that what they are

doing is opposed to all the beliefs which they profess, and in the

depths of their souls, when they are left alone with their

conscience, they are ashamed and miserable at the recollection of

it, especially if the baseness of their action has been pointed

out to them. A man of the present day, whether he believes in the

divinity of Christ or not, cannot fail to see that to assist in

the capacity of tzar, minister, governor, or commissioner in

taking from a poor family its last cow for taxes to be spent on

cannons, or on the pay and pensions of idle officials, who live in

luxury and are worse than useless; or in putting into prison some

man we have ourselves corrupted, and throwing his family on the

streets; or in plundering and butchering in war; or in inculcating

savage and idolatrous superstitious in the place of the law of

Christ; or in impounding the cow found on one’s land, though it

belongs to a man who has no land; or to cheat the workman in a

factory, by imposing fines for accidentally spoiled articles; or

making a poor man pay double the value for anything simply because

he is in the direst poverty;—not a man of the present day can

fail to know that all these actions are base and disgraceful, and

that they need not do them. They all know it. They know that

what they are doing is wrong, and would not do it for anything in

the world if they had the power of resisting the forces which shut

their eyes to the criminality of their actions and impel them to

commit them.

 

In nothing is the pitch of inconsistency modern life has attained

to so evident as in universal conscription, which is the last

resource and the final expression of violence.

 

Indeed, it is only because this state of universal armament has

been brought about gradually and imperceptibly, and because

governments have exerted, in maintaining it, every resource of

intimidation, corruption, brutalization, and violence, that we do

not see its flagrant inconsistency with the Christian ideas and

sentiments by which the modern world is permeated.

 

We are so accustomed to the inconsistency that we do not see all

the hideous folly and immorality of men voluntarily choosing the

profession of butchery as though it were an honorable career, of

poor wretches submitting to conscription, or in countries where

compulsory service has not been introduced, of people voluntarily

abandoning a life of industry to recruit soldiers and train them

as murderers. We know that all of these men are either

Christians, or profess humane and liberal principles, and they

know that they thus become partly responsible—through universal

conscription, personally responsible—for the most insane,

aimless, and brutal murders. And yet they all do it.

 

More than that, in Germany, where compulsory service first

originated, Caprivi has given expression to what had been hitherto

so assiduously concealed—that is, that the men that the soldiers

will have to kill are not foreigners alone, but their own

countrymen, the very working people from whom they themselves are

taken. And this admission has not opened people’s eyes, has not

horrified them! They still go like sheep to the slaughter, and

submit to everything required of them.

 

And that is not all: the Emperor of Germany has lately shown still

more clearly the duties of the army, by thanking and rewarding a

soldier for killing a defenseless citizen who made his approach

incautiously. By rewarding an action always regarded as base and

cowardly even by men on the lowest level of morality, William has

shown that a soldier’s chief duty—the one most appreciated by the

authorities—is that of executioner; and not a professional

executioner who kills only condemned criminals, but one ready to

butcher any innocent man at the word of command.

 

And even that is not all. In 1892, the same William, the ENFANT

TERRIBLE of state authority, who says plainly what other people

only think, in addressing some soldiers gave public utterance to

the following speech, which was reported next day in thousands of

newspapers: “Conscripts!” he said, “you have sworn fidelity to ME

before the altar and the minister of God! You are still too young

to understand all the importance of what has been said here; let

your care before all things be to obey the orders and instructions

given you. You have sworn fidelity TO ME, lads of my guard; THAT

MEANS THAT YOU ARE NOW MY SOLDIERS, that YOU HAVE GIVEN YOURSELVES

TO ME BODY AND SOUL. For you there is now but one enemy, MY

enemy. IN THESE DAYS OF SOCIALISTIC SEDITION IT MAY COME TO PASS

THAT I COMMAND YOU TO FIRE ON YOUR OWN KINDRED, YOUR BROTHERS,

EVEN YOUR OWN FATHERS AND MOTHERS—WHICH GOD FORBID!—even then

you are bound to obey my orders without hesitation.”

 

This man expresses what all sensible rulers think, but studiously

conceal. He says openly that the soldiers are in HIS service, at

HIS disposal, and must be ready for HIS advantage to murder even

their brothers and fathers.

 

In the most brutal words he frankly exposes all the horrors and

criminality for which men prepare themselves in entering the army,

and the depths of ignominy to which they fall in promising

obedience. Like a bold hypnotizer, he tests the degree of

insensibility of the hypnotized subject. He touches his skin with

a red-hot iron; the skin smokes and scorches, but the sleeper does

not awake.

 

This miserable man, imbecile and drunk with power, outrages in

this utterance everything that can be sacred for a man of the

modern world. And yet all the Christians, liberals, and

cultivated people, far from resenting this outrage, did not even

observe it.

 

The last, the most extreme test is put before men in its coarsest

form. And they do not seem even to notice