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
How can we, who are standing on the threshold of a war of
inner revolutions, which is terrifying by its wretchedness and
destructiveness, and in comparison with which, as those who are
preparing it say, the terrors of the year '93 will be play, speak
of a danger which is threatened us by the Dahomeans, the Zulus,
etc., who live far, far away, and do not think of attacking us, and
by those few thousands of robbers, thieves, and murderers, whom we
ourselves have stupefied and corrupted, and whose number is not
at all diminishing as the result of all our courts, prisons, and
capital punishments?
Besides, this fear of the abolition of the visible protection of
the policeman is preëminently a fear of city people, that is, of
people who live under abnormal and artificial conditions. Men who
live under normal conditions of life, not amidst cities, but amidst
Nature, struggling with it, live without this protection and know
how little violence can protect them against the actual dangers with
which they are surrounded. In this fear there is something morbid,
which depends mainly on those false conditions under which many of
us live and have grown up.
An alienist told me how one summer day he was accompanied by his
insane patients as far as the gate of the hospital which he was
leaving. "Come with me to the city," the doctor proposed to them.
The patients agreed to it, and a small crowd followed the doctor.
But the farther they proceeded along the street, where took place
the free motion of sound men, the more did they feel timid, and
the more did they press close to the doctor, retarding his walk.
Finally, they all began to ask him to take them back to the
hospital, to their senseless, but habitual mode of life, to their
guards, their blows, their long sleeves, their solitary cells.
Even thus men press close and hanker after their senseless structure
of life, their factories, courts, prisons, capital punishments,
wars, though Christianity calls them to freedom, to the free,
rational life of the future, the imminent age.
Men say, "By what shall we be made secure, when the existing order
is destroyed? What will the new orders be which will take the place
of those of the present time, and in what will they consist? So long
as we do not know how our life will be composed, we shall not move
on or budge from our place."
This demand is what the explorer of new countries might put forth,
in demanding a detailed description of the country into which he is
entering.
If the life of the individual man, in passing from one age to
another, were fully known to him, he would have no reason for
living. The same is true of the life of humanity: if it had a
programme of the life which awaits it as it enters upon its new age,
this would be the surest symptom that it is not living, does not
move on, but is whirling about in one spot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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