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
Let all those external improvements, of which religious and
scientific men may dream, be accomplished; let all men accept
Christianity, and let all those ameliorations, which all kinds of
Bellamys and Richets wish for, take place, with every imaginable
addition and correction--but let with all that the same hypocrisy
remain as before; let men not profess the truth which they know,
but continue to pretend that they believe in what they really do
not believe, and respect what they really do not respect, and the
condition of men will not only remain the same, but will even grow
worse and worse. The more people shall have to eat, the more there
shall be of telegraphs, telephones, books, newspapers, journals, the
more means will there be for the dissemination of discordant lies
and of hypocrisy, and the more will men be disunited and, therefore,
wretched, as is indeed the case at present.
Let all these external changes take place, and the condition of
humanity will not improve. But let each man at once in his life,
according to his strength, profess the truth, as he knows it, or let
him at least not defend the untruth, which he does, giving it out
as the truth, and there would at once, in this present year 1893,
take place such changes in the direction of the emancipation of men
and the establishment of truth upon earth as we do not dare even to
dream of for centuries to come.
For good reason Christ's only speech which is not meek, but
reproachful and cruel, was directed to the hypocrites and against
hypocrisy. What corrupts, angers, bestializes, and, therefore,
disunites men, is not thieving, nor spoliation, nor murder, nor
fornication, nor forgery, but the lie, that especial lie of
hypocrisy which in the consciousness of men destroys the distinction
between good and evil, deprives them of the possibility of avoiding
the evil and seeking the good, deprives them of what forms the
essence of the true human life, and so stands in the way of every
perfection of men.
Men who do not know the truth and who do evil, awakening in others
a sympathetic feeling for their victims and a contempt for their
acts, do evil only to those whom they injure; but the men who know
the truth and do the evil, which is concealed under hypocrisy, do
evil to themselves and to those whom they injure, and to thousands
of others who are offended by the lie, with which they attempt to
conceal the evil done by them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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