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
He knows all this, and he cannot help but suffer torments from this
crying contradiction between what ought to be and what actually
exists. "From all the data and from everything which I know all
men profess," the labouring man says to himself, "I ought to be
free, equal to all other men, and loved; but I am a slave,--I am
humiliated and hated." And he himself hates and seeks for means
to save himself from this position, to throw off his foe, who is
pressing down on him, and himself to get on top of him. They say,
"The working men are not right in their desire to take the place of
the capitalists, nor the poor in their desire to take the place of
the rich." This is not true: the working men and the poor would be
in the wrong, if they wished for it in a world in which slaves and
masters, the rich and the poor, are established by God; but they
wish for it in a world in which is professed the Gospel teaching,
the first proposition of which is the filial relation of men to God,
and so the brotherhood and equality of all men. And no matter how
much men may try, it is impossible to conceal the fact that one of
the first conditions of a Christian life is love, not in words, but
in work.
In a still greater contradiction and in still greater sufferings
lives the man of the so-called cultured class. Every such man, if he
believes in anything, believes, if not in the brotherhood of men,
at least in humanitarianism; if not in humanitarianism, at least in
justice; if not in justice, at least in science,--and with all that
knows that his whole life is built on conditions which are quite
the reverse of all that, of all the tenets of Christianity, and
humanity, and justice, and science.
He knows that all the habits in which he is brought up, and the
deprivation of which would be a torment for him, can be gratified
only by the painful, often perilous labour of oppressed working men,
that is, by the most palpable, coarse violation of those principles
of Christianity, humanitarianism, justice, and even science (I
mean the demands of political economy), which he professes. He
professes the principles of brotherhood, humanitarianism, justice,
science, and yet lives in such a way that he needs that oppression
of the labouring men which he denies, and even in such a way that
his whole life is an exploitation of this oppression, and not only
does he live in this way, but also he directs his activity to the
maintenance of this order of things, which is directly opposed to
everything in which he believes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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