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

you to sacrifice

your sentiments of humanity to support it.

 

Above all, even if you allow that this organization is necessary,

why do you believe it to be your duty to maintain it at the cost

of your best feelings? Who has made you the nurse in charge of

this sick and moribund organization? Not society nor the state

nor anyone; no one has asked you to undertake this; you who fill

your position of landowner, merchant, tzar, priest, or soldier

know very well that you occupy that position by no means with the

unselfish aim of maintaining the organization of life necessary to

men’s happiness, but simply in your own interests, to satisfy your

own covetousness or vanity or ambition or indolence or cowardice.

If you did not desire that position, you would not be doing your

utmost to retain it. Try the experiment of ceasing to commit the

cruel, treacherous, and base actions that you are constantly

committing in order to retain your position, and you will lose it

at once. Try the simple experiment, as a government official, of

giving up lying, and refusing to take a part in executions and

acts of violence; as a priest, of giving up deception; as a

soldier, of giving up murder; as landowner or manufacturer, of

giving up defending your property by fraud and force; and you will

at once lose the position which you pretend is forced upon you,

and which seems burdensome to you.

 

A man cannot be placed against his will in a situation opposed to

his conscience.

 

If you find yourself in such a position it is not because it is

necessary to anyone whatever, but simply because you wish it. And

therefore knowing that your position is repugnant to your heart

and your head, and to your faith, and even to the science in which

you believe, you cannot help reflecting upon the question whether

in retaining it, and above all trying to justify it, you are doing

what you ought to do.

 

You might risk making a mistake if you had time to see and

retrieve your fault, and if you ran the risk for something of some

value. But when you know beyond all doubt that you may disappear

any minute, without the least possibility either for yourself or

those you draw after you into your error, of retrieving the

mistake, when you know that whatever you may do in the external

organization of life it will all disappear as quickly and surely

as you will yourself, and will leave no trace behind, it is clear

that you have no reasonable ground for running the risk of such a

fearful mistake.

 

It would be perfectly simple and clear if you did not by your

hypocrisy disguise the truth which has so unmistakably been

revealed to us.

 

Share all that you have with others, do not heap up riches, do not

steal, do not cause suffering, do not kill, do not unto others

what you would not they should do unto you, all that has been said

not eighteen hundred, but five thousand years ago, and there could

be no doubt of the truth of this law if it were not for hypocrisy.

Except for hypocrisy men could not have failed, if not to put the

law in practice, at least to recognize it, and admit that it is

wrong not to put it in practice.

 

But you will say that there is the public good to be considered,

and that on that account one must not and ought not to conform to

these principles; for the public good one may commit acts of

violence and murder. It is better for one man to die than that

the whole people perish, you will say like Caiaphas, and you sign

the sentence of death of one man, of a second, and a third; you

load your gun against this man who is to perish for the public

good, you imprison him, you take his possessions. You say that

you commit these acts of cruelty because you are a part of the

society and of the state; that it is your duty to serve them, and

as landowner, judge, emperor, or soldier to conform to their laws.

But besides belonging to the state and having duties created by

that position, you belong also to eternity and to God, who also

lays duties upon you. And just as your duties to your family and

to society are subordinate to your superior duties to the state,

in the same way the latter must necessarily be subordinated to the

duties dictated to you by the eternal life and by God. And just

as it would be senseless to pull up the telegraph posts for fuel

for a family or society and thus to increase its welfare at the

expense of public interests, in the same way it is senseless to do

violence, to execute, and to murder to increase the welfare of the

nation, because that is at the expense of the interests of

humanity.

 

Your duties as a citizen cannot but be subordinated to the

superior obligations of the eternal life of God, and cannot be in

opposition to them. As Christ’s disciples said eighteen centuries

ago: “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you

more than unto God, judge ye” (Acts iv. 19); and, “We ought to

obey God rather than men” (Acts v. 29).

 

It is asserted that, in order that the unstable order of things,

established in one corner of the world for a few men, may not be

destroyed, you ought to commit acts of violence which destroy the

eternal and immutable order established by God and by reason. Can

that possibly be?

 

And therefore you cannot but reflect on your position as

landowner, manufacturer, judge, emperor, president, minister,

priest, and soldier, which is bound up with violence, deception,

and murder, and recognize its unlawfulness.

 

I do not say that if you are a landowner you are bound to give up

your lands immediately to the poor; if a capitalist or

manufacturer, your money to your workpeople; or that if you are

Tzar, minister, official, judge, or general, you are bound to

renounce immediately the advantages of your position; or if a

soldier, on whom all the system of violence is based, to refuse

immediately to obey in spite of all the dangers of

insubordination.

 

If you do so, you will be doing the best thing possible. But it

may happen, and it is most likely, that you will not have the

strength to do so. You have relations, a family, subordinates and

superiors; you are under an influence so powerful that you cannot

shake it off; but you can always recognize the truth and refuse to

tell a lie about it. You need not declare that you are remaining

a landowner, manufacturer, merchant, artist, or writer because it

is useful to mankind; that you are governor, prosecutor, or tzar,

not because it is agreeable to you, because you are used to it,

but for the public good; that you continue to be a soldier, not

from fear of punishment, but because you consider the army

necessary to society. You can always avoid lying in this way to

yourself and to others, and you ought to do so; because the one

aim of your life ought to be to purify yourself from falsehood and

to confess the truth. And you need only do that and your

situation will change directly of itself.

 

There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to

you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is

to recognize and profess the truth.

 

And yet simply from the fact that other men as misguided and as

pitiful creatures as yourself have made you soldier, tzar,

landowner, capitalist, priest, or general, you undertake to commit

acts of violence obviously opposed to your reason and your heart,

to base your existence on the misfortunes of others, and above

all, instead of filling the one duty of your life, recognizing and

professing the truth, you feign not to recognize it and disguise

it from yourself and others.

 

And what are the conditions in which you are doing this? You who

may die any instant, you sign sentences of death, you declare war,

you take part in it, you judge, you punish, you plunder the

working people, you live luxuriously in the midst of the poor, and

teach weak men who have confidence in you that this must be so,

that the duty of men is to do this, and yet it may happen at the

moment when you are acting thus that a bacterium or a bull may

attack you and you will fall and die, losing forever the chance of

repairing the harm you have done to others, and above all to

yourself, in uselessly wasting a life which has been given you

only once in eternity, without having accomplished the only thing

you ought to have done.

 

However commonplace and out of date it may seem to us, however

confused we may be by hypocrisy and by the hypnotic suggestion

which results from it, nothing can destroy the certainty of this

simple and clearly defined truth. No external conditions can

guarantee our life, which is attended with inevitable sufferings

and infallibly terminated by death, and which consequently can

have no significance except in the constant accomplishment of what

is demanded by the Power which has placed us in life with a sole

certain guide—the rational conscience.

 

That is why that Power cannot require of us what is irrational and

impossible: the organization of our temporary external life, the

life of society or of the state. That Power demands of us only

what is reasonable, certain, and possible: to serve the kingdom of

God, that is, to contribute to the establishment of the greatest

possible union between all living beings—a union possible only in

the truth; and to recognize and to profess the revealed truth,

which is always in our power.

 

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and

all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt. vi. 33.)

 

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to

the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by

the recognition and profession of the truth by every man.

 

“The kingdom of God cometh not with outward show; neither shall

they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for behold, the kingdom of God is

within you.” (Luke xvii. 20, 21.)

 

THE END.

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[Transcribists note: This translation contains what seems to my

early 21st Century perception as mistakes, both in typography and

in standardness of language. I have left issues of standard

language uncorrected, and have only fixed typographical errors

in which the word was nearly unrecognizable, but clear from context.

 

An example: “…those who have seized power AUD who keep it…” was

changed to: “…those who have seized power AND who keep it…”.

 

Another example: where he meant “village” the book has “vilage”;

I left such misspellings as is.

 

In some cases, missing punctuation in a series was corrected, where

every other member of the series is punctuated: 1. 2. 3 4.

If I had a doubt, nothing was changed.

 

I indented paragraphs, for clarity, when Tolstoy quotes large blocks

of text from other authors. However, often Tolsoy interspersed

quoted material with his commentary [as when talking about the author

Farrar]. I was not able to separate these for fear of editing the

author.

 

Italics were represented here, with the substitution of capital

letters.

 

Translations for long passages of French follow in the footnotes.

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Project Gutenberg’s The Kingdom of