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

they continue to persuade themselves and others that

they are all much concerned about the welfare of these working

classes, whom they have always trampled under their feet, and on

Sundays, richly dressed, they drive in sumptuous carriages to the

houses of God built in very mockery of Christianity, and there

listen to men, trained to this work of deception, who in white

neckties or in brocaded vestments, according to their

denomination, preach the love for their neighbor which they all

gainsay in their lives. And these people have so entered into

their part that they seriously believe that they really are what

they pretend to be.

 

The universal hypocrisy has so entered into the flesh and blood of

all classes of our modern society, it has reached such a pitch

that nothing in that way can rouse indignation. Hypocrisy in the

Greek means “acting,” and acting—playing a part—is always

possible. The representatives of Christ give their blessing to

the ranks of murderers holding their guns loaded against their

brothers; “for prayer” priests, ministers of various Christian

sects are always present, as indispensably as the hangman, at

executions, and sanction by their presence the compatibility of

murder with Christianity (a clergyman assisted at the attempt at

murder by electricity in America)—but such facts cause no one any

surprise.

 

There was recently held at Petersburg an international exhibition

of instruments of torture, handcuffs, models of solitary cells,

that is to say instruments of torture worse than knouts or rods,

and sensitive ladies and gentlemen went and amused themselves by

looking at them.

 

No one is surprised that together with its recognition of liberty,

equality, and fraternity, liberal science should prove the

necessity of war, punishment, customs, the censure, the regulation

of prostitution, the exclusion of cheap foreign laborers, the

hindrance of emigration, the justifiableness of colonization,

based on poisoning and destroying whole races of men called

savages, and so on.

 

People talk of the time when all men shall profess what is called

Christianity (that is, various professions of faith hostile to one

another), when all shall be well-fed and clothed, when all shall

be united from one end of the world to the other by telegraphs and

telephones, and be able to communicate by balloons, when all the

working classes are permeated by socialistic doctrines, when the

Trades Unions possess so many millions of members and so many

millions of rubles, when everyone is educated and all can read

newspapers and learn all the sciences.

 

But what good or useful thing can come of all these improvements,

if men do not speak and act in accordance with what they believe

to be the truth?

 

The condition of men is the result of their disunion. Their

disunion results from their not following the truth which is one,

but falsehoods which are many. The sole means of uniting men is

their union in the truth. And therefore the more sincerely men

strive toward the truth, the nearer they get to unity.

 

But how can men be united in the truth or even approximate to it,

if they do not even express the truth they know, but hold that

there is no need to do so, and pretend to regard as truth what

they believe to be false?

 

And therefore no improvement is possible so long as men are

hypocritical and hide the truth from themselves, so long as they

do not recognize that their union and therefore their welfare is

only possible in the truth, and do not put the recognition and

profession of the truth revealed to them higher than everything

else.

 

All the material improvements that religious and scientific men

can dream of may be accomplished; all men may accept Christianity,

and all the reforms desired by the Bellamys may be brought about

with every possible addition and improvement, but if the hypocrisy

which rules nowadays still exists, if men do not profess the truth

they know, but continue to feign belief in what they do not

believe and veneration for what they do not respect, their

condition will remain the same, or even grow worse and worse. The

more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs,

telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means

there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and

the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become,

which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

 

All these material reforms may be realized, but the position of

humanity will not be improved. But only let each man, according

to his powers, at once realize in his life the truth he knows, or

at least cease to support the falsehoods he is supporting in the

place of the truth, and at once, in this year 1893, we should see

such reforms as we do not dare to hope for within a century—the

emancipation of men and the reign of truth upon earth.

 

Not without good reason was Christ’s only harsh and threatening

reproof directed against hypocrites and hypocrisy. It is not

theft nor robbery nor murder nor fornication, but falsehood, the

special falsehood of hypocrisy, which corrupts men, brutalizes

them and makes them vindictive, destroys all distinction between

right and wrong in their conscience, deprives them of what is the

true meaning of all real human life, and debars them from all

progress toward perfection.

 

Those who do evil through ignorance of the truth provoke sympathy

with their victims and repugnance for their actions, they do harm

only to those they attack; but those who know the truth and do

evil masked by hypocrisy, injure themselves and their victims, and

thousands of other men as well who are led astray by the falsehood

with which the wrongdoing is disguised.

 

Thieves, robbers, murderers, and cheats, who commit crimes

recognized by themselves and everyone else as evil, serve as an

example of what ought not to be done, and deter others from

similar crimes. But those who commit the same thefts, robberies,

murders, and other crimes, disguising them under all kinds of

religious or scientific or humanitarian justifications, as all

landowners, merchants, manufacturers, and government officials do,

provoke others to imitation, and so do harm not only to those who

are directly the victims of their crimes, but to thousands and

millions of men whom they corrupt by obliterating their sense of

the distinction between right and wrong.

 

A single fortune gained by trading in goods necessary to the

people or in goods pernicious in their effects, or by financial

speculations, or by acquiring land at a low price the value of

which is increased by the needs of the population, or by an

industry ruinous to the health and life of those employed in it,

or by military or civil service of the state, or by any employment

which trades on men’s evil instincts—a single fortune acquired in

any of these ways, not only with the sanction, but even with the

approbation of the leading men in society, and masked with an

ostentation of philanthropy, corrupts men incomparably more than

millions of thefts and robberies committed against the recognized

forms of law and punishable as crimes.

 

A single execution carried out by prosperous educated men

uninfluenced by passion, with the approbation and assistance of

Christian ministers, and represented as something necessary and

even just, is infinitely more corrupting and brutalizing to men

than thousands of murders committed by uneducated working people

under the influence of passion. An execution such as was proposed

by Joukovsky, which would produce even a sentiment of religious

emotion in the spectators, would be one of the most perverting

actions imaginable. (SEE vol. iv. of the works of Joukovsky.)

 

Every war, even the most humanely conducted, with all its ordinary

consequences, the destruction of harvests, robberies, the license

and debauchery, and the murder with the justifications of its

necessity and justice, the exaltation and glorification of

military exploits, the worship of the flag, the patriotic

sentiments, the feigned solicitude for the wounded, and so on,

does more in one year to pervert men’s minds than thousands of

robberies, murders, and arsons perpetrated during hundreds of

years by individual men under the influence of passion.

 

The luxurious expenditure of a single respectable and so-called

honorable family, even within the conventional limits, consuming

as it does the produce of as many days of labor as would suffice

to provide for thousands living in privation near, does more to

pervert men’s minds than thousands of the violent orgies of coarse

tradespeople, officers, and workmen of drunken and debauched

habits, who smash up glasses and crockery for amusement.

 

One solemn religious procession, one service, one sermon from the

altar-steps or the pulpit, in which the preacher does not believe,

produces incomparably more evil than thousands of swindling

tricks, adulteration of food, and so on.

 

We talk of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. But the hypocrisy of

our society far surpasses the comparatively innocent hypocrisy of

the Pharisees. They had at least an external religious law, the

fulfillment of which hindered them from seeing their obligations

to their neighbors. Moreover, these obligations were not nearly

so clearly defined in their day. Nowadays we have no such

religious law to exonerate us from our duties to our neighbors (I

am not speaking now of the coarse and ignorant persons who still

fancy their sins can be absolved by confession to a priest or by

the absolution of the Pope). On the contrary, the law of the

Gospel which we all profess in one form or another directly

defines these duties. Besides, the duties which had then been

only vaguely and mystically expressed by a few prophets have now

been so clearly formulated, have become such truisms, that they

are repeated even by schoolboys and journalists. And so it would

seem that men of to-day cannot pretend that they do not know these

duties.

 

A man of the modern world who profits by the order of things based

on violence, and at the same time protests that he loves his

neighbor and does not observe what he is doing in his daily life

to his neighbor, is like a brigand who has spent his life in

robbing men, and who, caught at last, knife in hand, in the very

act of striking his shrieking victim, should declare that he had

no idea that what he was doing was disagreeable to the man he had

robbed and was prepared to murder. Just as this robber and

murderer could not deny what was evident to everyone, so it would

seem that a man living upon the privations of the oppressed

classes cannot persuade himself and others that he desires the

welfare of those he plunders, and that he does not know how the

advantages he enjoys are obtained.

 

It is impossible to convince ourselves that we do not know that

there are a hundred thousand men in prison in Russia alone to

guarantee the security of our property and tranquillity, and that

we do not know of the law tribunals in which we take part, and

which, at our initiative, condemn those who have attacked our

property or our security to prison, exile, or forced labor,

whereby men no worse than those who condemn them are ruined and

corrupted; or that we do not know that we only possess all that we

do possess because it has been acquired and is defended for us by

murder and violence.

 

We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who

marches up and down beneath our windows to guarantee our security

while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the

theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers

who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly

our property is attacked.

 

We know very