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

… If Columbus had reasoned thus he

would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set off

upon the ocean, not knowing the route, on the ocean on which no

one had sailed, to sail toward a land whose existence was

doubtful. By this madness he discovered a new world.

Doubtless if the peoples of the world could simply transfer

themselves from one furnished mansion to another and better

one—it would make it much easier; but unluckily there is no

one to get humanity’s new dwelling ready for it. The future is

even worse than the ocean—there is nothing there—it will be

what men and circumstances make it.

 

“If you are content with the old world, try to preserve it, it

is very sick and cannot hold out much longer. But if you

cannot bear to live in everlasting dissonance between your

beliefs and your life, thinking one thing and doing another,

get out of the mediaeval whited sepulchers, and face your

fears. I know very well it is not easy.

 

“It is not a little thing to cut one’s self off from all to

which a man has been accustomed from his birth, with which he

has grown up to maturity. Men are ready for tremendous

sacrifices, but not for those which life demands of them. Are

they ready to sacrifice modern civilization, their manner of

life, their religion, the received conventional morality?

 

“Are we ready to give up all the results we have attained with

such effort, results of which we have been boasting for three

centuries; to give up every convenience and charm of our

existence, to prefer savage youth to the senile decay of

civilization, to pull down the palace raised for us by our

ancestors only for the pleasure of having a hand in the

founding of a new house, which will doubtless be built long

after we are gone?” (Herzen, vol. v. p. 55.)

 

Thus wrote almost half a century ago the Russian writer, who with

prophetic insight saw clearly then, what even the most

unreflecting man sees to-day, the impossibility, that is, of life

continuing on its old basis, and the necessity of establishing new

forms of life.

 

It is clear now from the very simplest, most commonplace point of

view, that it is madness to remain under the roof of a building

which cannot support its weight, and that we must leave it. And

indeed it is difficult to imagine a position more wretched than

that of the Christian world to-day, with its nations armed against

one another, with its constantly increasing taxation to maintain

its armies, with the hatred of the working class for the rich ever

growing more intense, with the Damocles sword of war forever

hanging over the heads of all, ready every instant to fall,

certain to fall sooner or later.

 

Hardly could any revolution be more disastrous for the great mass

of the population than the present order or rather disorder of our

life, with its daily sacrifices to exhausting and unnatural toil,

to poverty, drunkenness, and profligacy, with all the horrors of

the war that is at hand, which will swallow up in one year more

victims than all the revolutions of the century.

 

What will become of humanity if each of us performs the duty God

demands of us through the conscience implanted within us? Will

not harm come if, being wholly in the power of a master, I carry

out, in the workshop erected and directed by him, the orders he

gives me, strange though they may seem to me who do not know the

Master’s final aims?

 

But it is not even this question “What will happen?” that agitates

men when they hesitate to fulfill the Master’s will. They are

troubled by the question how to live without those habitual

conditions of life which we call civilization, culture, art, and

science. We feel ourselves all the burdensomeness of life as it

is; we see also that this organization of life must inevitably be

our ruin, if it continues. At the same time we want the

conditions of our life which arise out of this organization—our

civilization, culture, art, and science—to remain intact. It is

as though a man, living in an old house and suffering from cold

and all sorts of inconvenience in it, knowing, too, that it is on

the point of falling to pieces, should consent to its being

rebuilt, but only on the condition that he should not be required

to leave it: a condition which is equivalent to refusing to have

it rebuilt at all.

 

“But what if I leave the house and give up every convenience for a

time, and the new house is not built, or is built on a different

plan so that I do not find in it the comforts to which I am

accustomed?” But seeing that the materials and the builders are

here, there is every likelihood that the new house will on the

contrary be better built than the old one. And at the same time,

there is not only the likelihood but the certainty that the old

house will fall down and crush those who remain within it.

Whether the old habitual conditions of life are supported, or

whether they are abolished and altogether new and better

conditions arise; in any case, there is no doubt we shall be

forced to leave the old forms of life which have become impossible

and fatal, and must go forward to meet the future.

 

“Civilization, art, science, culture, will disappear!”

 

Yes, but all these we know are only various manifestations of

truth, and the change that is before us is only to be made for the

sake of a closer attainment and realization of truth. How then

can the manifestations of truth disappear through our realizing

it? These manifestations will be different, higher, better, but

they will not cease to be. Only what is false in them will be

destroyed; all the truth there was in them will only be stronger

and more flourishing.

 

Take thought, oh, men, and have faith in the Gospel, in whose

teaching is your happiness. If you do not take thought, you will

perish just as the men perished, slain by Pilate, or crushed by

the tower of Siloam; as millions of men have perished, slayers and

slain, executing and executed, torturers and tortured alike, and

as the man foolishly perished, who filled his granaries full and

made ready for a long life and died the very night that he planned

to begin his life. Take thought and have faith in the Gospel,

Christ said eighteen hundred years ago, and he says it with even

greater force now that the calamities foretold by him have come to

pass, and the senselessness of our life has reached the furthest

point of suffering and madness.

 

Nowadays, after so many centuries of fruitless efforts to make our

life secure by the pagan organization of life, it must be evident

to everyone that all efforts in that direction only introduce

fresh dangers into personal and social life, and do not render it

more secure in any way.

 

Whatever names we dignify ourselves with, whatever uniforms we

wear, whatever priests we anoint ourselves before, however many

millions we possess, however many guards are stationed along our

road, however many policemen guard our wealth, however many so-called criminals, revolutionists, and anarchists we punish,

whatever exploits we have performed, whatever states we may have

founded, fortresses and towers we may have erected—from Babel to

the Eiffel Tower—there are two inevitable conditions of life,

confronting all of us, which destroy its whole meaning; (1) death,

which may at any moment pounce upon each of us; and (2) the

transitoriness of all our works, which so soon pass away and leave

no trace. Whatever we may do—found companies, build palaces and

monuments, write songs and poems—it is all not for long time.

Soon it passes away, leaving no trace. And therefore, however we

may conceal it from ourselves, we cannot help seeing that the

significance of our life cannot lie in our personal fleshly

existence, the prey of incurable suffering and inevitable death,

nor in any social institution or organization. Whoever you may be

who are reading these lines, think of your position and of your

duties—not of your position as landowner, merchant, judge,

emperor, president, minister, priest, soldier, which has been

temporarily allotted you by men, and not of the imaginary duties

laid on you by those positions, but of your real positions in

eternity as a creature who at the will of Someone has been called

out of unconsciousness after an eternity of non-existence to which

you may return at any moment at his will. Think of your duties—

not your supposed duties as a landowner to your estate, as a

merchant to your business, as emperor, minister, or official to

the state, but of your real duties, the duties that follow from

your real position as a being called into life and endowed with

reason and love.

 

Are you doing what he demands of you who has sent you into the

world, and to whom you will soon return? Are you doing what he

wills? Are you doing his will, when as landowner or manufacturer

you rob the poor of the fruits of their toil, basing your life on

this plunder of the workers, or when, as judge or governor, you

ill treat men, sentence them to execution, or when as soldiers you

prepare for war, kill and plunder?

 

You will say that the world is so made that this is inevitable,

and that you do not do this of your own free will, but because you

are forced to do so. But can it be that you have such a strong

aversion to men’s sufferings, ill treatment, and murder, that you

have such an intense need of love and co-operation with your

fellows that you see clearly that only by the recognition of the

equality of all, and by mutual services, can the greatest possible

happiness be realized; that your head and your heart, the faith

you profess, and even science itself tell you the same thing, and

yet that in spite of it all you can be forced by some confused and

complicated reasoning to act in direct opposition to all this;

that as landowner or capitalist you are bound to base your whole

life on the oppression of the people; that as emperor or president

you are to command armies, that is, to be the head and commander

of murderers; or that as government official you are forced to

take from the poor their last pence for rich men to profit and

share them among themselves; or that as judge or juryman you could

be forced to sentence erring men to ill treatment and death

because the truth was not revealed to them, or above all, for that

is the basis of all the evil, that you could be forced to become a

soldier, and renouncing your free will and your human sentiments,

could undertake to kill anyone at the command of other men?

 

It cannot be.

 

Even if you are told that all this is necessary for the

maintenance of the existing order of things, and that this social

order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and

wars is necessary to society; that still greater disasters would

ensue if this organization were destroyed; all that is said only

by those who profit by this organization, while those who suffer

from it—and they are ten times as numerous—think and say quite

the contrary. And at the bottom of your heart you know yourself

that it is not true, that the existing organization has outlived

its time, and must inevitably be reconstructed on new principles,

and that consequently there is no obligation upon