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
Nor is any one surprised at the way the liberal science proves, by
the side of the assumption of equality, fraternity, liberty, the
necessity of an army, of executions, custom-houses, the censorship,
the regulation of prostitution, the expulsion of cheap labour,
and the prohibition of immigration, and the necessity and justice
of colonization, which is based on the poisoning, plundering, and
destruction of whole tribes of men who are called savage, and so
forth.
People talk of what will happen when all men shall profess what
is called Christianity (that is, various mutually hostile
professions); when all shall be well fed and well clothed; when all
shall be united with one another from one end of the world to the
other by means of telegraphs and telephones, and shall communicate
with one another by means of balloons; when all the labourers shall
be permeated with social teachings, and the labour-unions shall
have collected so many millions of members and of roubles; when all
men shall be cultured, and all shall read the papers and know the
sciences.
But of what use or good can all these improvements be, if people
shall not at the same time speak and do what they consider to be the
truth?
The calamities of men are certainly due to their disunion, and the
disunion is due to this, that men do not follow the truth, which
is one, but the lies, of which there are many. The only means for
the union of men into one is the union in truth; and so, the more
sincerely men strive toward the truth, the nearer they are to this
union.
But how can men be united in truth, or even approach it, if they not
only do not express the truth which they know, but even think that
it is unnecessary to do so, and pretend that they consider to be the
truth what they do not regard as the truth.
And so no amelioration of the condition of men is possible, so long
as men will pretend, that is, conceal the truth from themselves, so
long as they do not recognize that their union, and so their good,
is possible only in the truth, and so will not place the recognition
and profession of the truth, the one which has been revealed to
them, higher than anything else.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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