The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / MiscellaniesTolstoy, Leo, graf
Religion
The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / Miscellanies
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Russian literature -- Translations into English
Even if we admit that, in consequence of an unfortunate concurrence
of events in the government, as, for example, in France in the year
1870, some governments may be overthrown by force and the power pass
into other hands, this power would in no case be less oppressive
than the former one, and, defending itself against the infuriated
deposed enemies, would always be more despotic and cruel than the
former, as indeed has been the case in every revolution.
If the socialists and communists consider the individualistic,
capitalistic structure of society to be an evil, and the
anarchists consider the government itself to be an evil, there are
also monarchists, conservatives, capitalists, who consider the
socialistic, communistic, and anarchistic order to be evil; and all
these parties have no other means than force for the purpose of
uniting men. No matter which of these parties may triumph, it will
be compelled, for the materialization of its tenets, as well as
for the maintenance of its power, not only to make use of all the
existing means of violence, but also to invent new ones. Other men
will be enslaved, and men will be compelled to do something else;
but there will be, not only the same, but even a more cruel form of
violence and enslavement, because, in consequence of the struggle,
the hatred of men toward one another will be intensified, and at the
same time new means of enslavement will be worked out and confirmed.
Thus it has always been after every revolution, every attempt at a
revolution, every plot, every violent change of government. Every
struggle only strengthens the means of the enslavement of those who
at a given time are in power.
The condition of the men of our Christian world, and especially the
current ideals themselves prove this in a striking manner.
There is left but one sphere of human activity which is not usurped
by the governmental power,--the domestic, economic sphere, the
sphere of the private life and of labour. But even this sphere,
thanks to the struggle of the communists and socialists, is slowly
being usurped by the governments, so that labour and rest, the
domicile, the attire, the food of men will by degrees be determined
and directed by the governments, if the wishes of the reformers are
to be fulfilled.
The whole long, eighteen-centuries-old course of the life of
the Christian nations has inevitably brought them back to the
necessity of solving the question, so long evaded by them, as to the
acceptance or non-acceptance of Christ's teaching, and the solution
of the question resulting from it as regards the social life,
whether to resist or not to resist evil with violence, but with
this difference, that formerly men could accept the solution which
Christianity offered, or not accept it, while now the solution has
become imperative, because it alone frees them from that condition
of slavery in which they have become entangled as in a snare.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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