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
All these men and those who live on them, their wives, teachers,
children, cooks, actors, jockeys, and so forth, live by the blood
which in one way or another, by one class of leeches or by another,
is sucked out of the working people; thus they live, devouring each
day for their pleasures hundreds and thousands of work-days of the
exhausted labourers, who are driven to work by the threat of being
killed; they see the privations and sufferings of these labourers,
of their children, old men, women, sick people; they know of the
penalties to which the violators of this established spoliation are
subjected, and they not only do not diminish their luxury, do not
conceal it, but impudently display before these oppressed labourers,
who for the most part hate them, as though on purpose to provoke
them, their parks, castles, theatres, chases, races, and at the
same time assure themselves and one another that they are all very
much concerned about the good of the masses, whom they never stop
treading underfoot; and on Sundays they dress themselves in costly
attire and drive in expensive carriages into houses especially built
for the purpose of making fun of Christianity, and there listen to
men especially trained in this lie, who in every manner possible, in
vestments and without vestments, in white neckties, preach to one
another the love of men, which they all deny with their whole lives.
And, while doing all this, these men so enter into their parts that
they seriously believe that they actually are what they pretend to
be.
The universal hypocrisy, which has entered into the flesh and blood
of all the classes of our time, has reached such limits that nothing
of this kind ever fills any one with indignation. Hypocrisy with
good reason means the same as acting, and anybody can pretend,--act
a part. Nobody is amazed at such phenomena as that the successors
of Christ bless the murderers who are lined up and hold the guns
which are loaded for their brothers; that the priests, the pastors
of all kinds of Christian confessions, always, as inevitably as
the executioners, take part in executions, with their presence
recognizing the murder as compatible with Christianity (at an
electrocution in America, a preacher was present).
Lately there was an international prison exhibition in St.
Petersburg, where implements of torture were exhibited, such as
manacles, models of solitary cells, that is, worse implements of
torture than knouts and rods, and sensitive gentlemen and ladies
went to look at all this, and they enjoyed the sight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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