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

cannot employ

violence, he is obliged to offer his property at once to the

loss by violence inflicted on it by the authorities.

 

Q. Can a Christian give a vote at elections, or take part in

government or law business?

 

A. No; participation in election, government, or law business

is participation in government by force.

 

Q. Wherein lies the chief significance of the doctrine of

nonresistance?

 

A. In the fact that it alone allows of the possibility of

eradicating evil from one’s own heart, and also from one’s

neighbor’s. This doctrine forbids doing that whereby evil has

endured for ages and multiplied in the world. He who attacks

another and injures him, kindles in the other a feeling of

hatred, the root of every evil. To injure another because he

has injured us, even with the aim of overcoming evil, is

doubling the harm for him and for oneself; it is begetting, or

at least setting free and inciting, that evil spirit which we

should wish to drive out. Satan can never be driven out by

Satan. Error can never be corrected by error, and evil cannot

be vanquished by evil.

 

True nonresistance is the only real resistance to evil. It is

crushing the serpent’s head. It destroys and in the end

extirpates the evil feeling.

 

Q. But if that is the true meaning of the rule of nonresistance, can it always put into practice?

 

A. It can be put into practice like every virtue enjoined by

the law of God. A virtue cannot be practiced in all

circumstances without self-sacrifice, privation, suffering, and

in extreme cases loss of life itself. But he who esteems life

more than fulfilling the will of God is already dead to the

only true life. Trying to save his life he loses it. Besides,

generally speaking, where nonresistance costs the sacrifice of

a single life or of some material welfare, resistance costs a

thousand such sacrifices.

 

Nonresistance is Salvation; Resistance is Ruin.

 

It is incomparably less dangerous to act justly than unjustly,

to submit to injuries than to resist them with violence, less

dangerous even in one’s relations to the present life. If all

men refused to resist evil by evil our world would be happy.

 

Q. But so long as only a few act thus, what will happen to

them?

 

A. If only one man acted thus, and all the rest agreed

to crucify him, would it not be nobler for him to die in the

glory of nonresisting love, praying for his enemies, than to

live to wear the crown of Caesar stained with the blood of the

slain? However, one man, or a thousand men, firmly resolved

not to oppose evil by evil are far more free from danger by

violence than those who resort to violence, whether among

civilized or savage neighbors. The robber, the murderer, and

the cheat will leave them in peace, sooner than those who

oppose them with arms, and those who take up the sword shall

perish by the sword, but those who seek after peace, and behave

kindly and harmlessly, forgiving and forgetting injuries, for

the most part enjoy peace, or, if they die, they die blessed.

In this way, if all kept the ordinance of nonresistance, there

would obviously be no evil nor crime. If the majority acted

thus they would establish the rule of love and good will even

over evil doers, never opposing evil with evil, and never

resorting to force. If there were a moderately large minority

of such men, they would exercise such a salutary moral

influence on society that every cruel punishment would be

abolished, and violence and feud would be replaced by peace and

love. Even if there were only a small minority of them, they

would rarely experience anything worse than the world’s

contempt, and meantime the world, though unconscious of it, and

not grateful for it, would be continually becoming wiser and

better for their unseen action on it. And if in the worst case

some members of the minority were persecuted to death, in dying

for the truth they would have left behind them their doctrine,

sanctified by the blood of their martyrdom. Peace, then, to

all who seek peace, and may overruling love be the imperishable

heritage of every soul who obeys willingly Christ’s word,

“Resist not evil.”

 

ADIN BALLOU.

 

For fifty years Ballou wrote and published books dealing

principally with the question of nonresistance to evil by force.

In these works, which are distinguished by the clearness of their

thought and eloquence of exposition, the question is looked at

from every possible side, and the binding nature of this command

on every Christian who acknowledges the Bible as the revelation of

God is firmly established. All the ordinary objections to the

doctrine of nonresistance from the Old and New Testaments are

brought forward, such as the expulsion of the moneychangers from

the Temple, and so on, and arguments follow in disproof of them

all. The practical reasonableness of this rule of conduct is

shown independently of Scripture, and all the objections

ordinarily made against its practicability are stated and refuted.

Thus one chapter in a book of his treats of nonresistance in

exceptional cases, and he owns in this connection that if there

were cases in which the rule of nonresistance were impossible of

application, it would prove that the law was not universally

authoritative. Quoting these cases, he shows that it is precisely

in them that the application of the rule is both necessary and

reasonable. There is no aspect of the question, either on his

side or on his opponents’, which he has not followed up in his

writings. I mention all this to show the unmistakable interest

which such works ought to have for men who make a profession of

Christianity, and because one would have thought Ballou’s work

would have been well known, and the ideas expressed by him would

lave been either accepted or refuted; but such has not been the

case.

 

The work of Garrison, the father, in his foundation of the Society

of Non-resistants and his Declaration, even more than my

correspondence with the Quakers, convinced me of the fact that the

departure of the ruling form of Christianity from the law of

Christ on nonresistance by force is an error that has long been

observed and pointed out, and that men have labored, and are still

laboring, to correct. Ballou’s work confirmed me still more in

this view. But the fate of Garrison, still more that of Ballou,

in being completely unrecognized in spite of fifty years of

obstinate and persistent work in the same direction, confirmed me

in the idea that there exists a kind of tacit but steadfast

conspiracy of silence about all such efforts.

 

Ballou died in August, 1890, and there was as obituary notice of

him in an American journal of Christian views (RELIGIO-PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL, August 23). In this laudatory notice it is

recorded that Ballou was the spiritual director of a parish, that

he delivered from eight to nine thousand sermons, married one

thousand couples, and wrote about five hundred articles; but there

is not a single word said of the object to which he devoted his

life; even the word “nonresistance” is not mentioned. Precisely

as it was with all the preaching of the Quakers for two hundred

years and, too, with the efforts of Garrison the father, the

foundation of his society and journal, and his Declaration, so it

is with the life-work of Ballou. It seems just as though it did

not exist and never had existed.

 

We have an astounding example of the obscurity of works which aim

at expounding the doctrine of nonresistance to evil by force, and

at confuting those who do not recognize this commandment, in the

book of the Tsech Helchitsky, which has only lately been noticed

and has not hitherto been printed.

 

Soon after the appearance of my book in German, I received a

letter from Prague, from a professor of the university there,

informing me of the existence of a work, never yet printed, by

Helchitsky, a Tsech of the fifteenth century, entitled “The Net of

Faith.” In this work, the professor told me, Helchitsky expressed

precisely the same view as to true and false Christianity as I had

expressed in my book “What I Believe.” The professor wrote to me

that Helchitsky’s work was to be published for the first time in

the Tsech language in the JOURNAL OF THE PETERSBURG ACADEMY OF

SILENCE. Since I could not obtain the book itself, I tried to

make myself acquainted with what was known of Helchitsky, and I

gained the following information from a German book sent me by the

Prague professor and from Pypin’s history of Tsech literature.

This was Pypin’s account:

 

“‘The Net of Faith’ is Christ’s teaching, which ought to draw

man up out of the dark depths of the sea of worldliness and his

own iniquity. True faith consists in believing God’s Word; but

now a time has come when men mistake the true faith for heresy,

and therefore it is for the reason to point out what the true

faith consists in, if anyone does not know this. It is hidden

in darkness from men, and they do not recognize the true law of

Christ.

 

“To make this law plain, Helchitsky points to the primitive

organization of Christian society—the organization which, he

says, is now regarded in the Roman Church as an abominable

heresy. This Primitive Church was his special ideal of social

organization, founded on equality, liberty, and fraternity.

Christianity, in Helchitsky’s view, still preserves these

elements, and it is only necessary for society to return to its

pure doctrine to render unnecessary every other form of social

order in which kings and popes are essential; the law of love

would alone be sufficient in every case.

 

“Historically, Helchitsky attributes the degeneration of

Christianity to the times of Constantine the Great, whom he

Pope Sylvester admitted into the Christian Church with all his

heathen morals and life. Constantine, in his turn, endowed the

Pope with worldly riches and power. From that time forward

these two ruling powers were constantly aiding one another to

strive for nothing but outward glory. Divines and

ecclesiastical dignitaries began to concern themselves only

about subduing the whole world to their authority, incited men

against one another to murder and plunder, and in creed and

life reduced Christianity to a nullity. Helchitsky denies

completely the right to make war and to inflict the punishment

of death; every soldier, even the ‘knight,’ is only a violent

evil doer—a murderer.”

 

The same account is given by the German book, with the addition of

a few biographical details and some extracts from Helchitsky’s

writings.

 

Having learnt the drift of Helchitsky’s teaching in this way, I

awaited all the more impatiently the appearance of “The Net of

Faith” in the journal of the Academy. But one year passed, then

two and three, and still the book did appear. It was only in 1888

that I learned that the printing of the book, which had been

begun, was stopped. I obtained the proofs of what had been

printed and read them through. It is a marvelous book from every

point of view.

 

Its general tenor is given with perfect accuracy by Pypin.

Helchitsky’s fundamental idea is that Christianity, by allying

itself with temporal power in the days of Constantine, and by

continuing to develop in such conditions, has become completely

distorted, and has ceased to be Christian altogether. Helchitsky

gave the title “The Net of Faith” to his book, taking as his motto

the verse of the Gospel about the calling of the disciples to be

fishers of men; and, developing this metaphor, he says:

 

“Christ, by means of his disciples, would