Brothers -- Fiction; Didactic fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Russia -- Social life and customs -- 1533-1917 -- Fiction
Of the pride of Satan what I think is this: it is hard for us on earth
to comprehend it, and therefore it is so easy to fall into error and to
share it, even imagining that we are doing something grand and fine.
Indeed, many of the strongest feelings and movements of our nature we
cannot comprehend on earth. Let not that be a stumbling-block, and
think not that it may serve as a justification to you for anything. For
the Eternal Judge asks of you what you can comprehend and not what you
cannot. You will know that yourself hereafter, for you will behold all
things truly then and will not dispute them. On earth, indeed, we are
as it were astray, and if it were not for the precious image of Christ
before us, we should be undone and altogether lost, as was the human
race before the flood. Much on earth is hidden from us, but to make up
for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond
with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of
our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why
the philosophers say that we cannot apprehend the reality of things on
earth.
God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and
His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what
grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with
other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in
you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be
indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.
_(h) Can a Man judge his Fellow Creatures? Faith to the End_
Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one
can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such a
criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more
than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will
be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had
been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal
standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the
criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him
yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself
makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he
will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If,
after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let
that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come,
but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not
he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and
condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe
it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the
saints.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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