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
We are all brothers, and yet every morning my brother or my sister
carries out my vessel. We are all brothers, and I need every morning
my cigar, sugar, a mirror, and so forth, objects in the manufacture
of which my brothers and my sisters, who are my equals, have been
losing their health, and I employ these articles and even demand
them. We are all brothers, and I live by working in a bank, or in
a business house, or a shop, in order to make all the wares which
my brothers need more expensive for them. We are all brothers,
and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging, and
punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned
by the whole composition of my life, and who, I know myself, ought
not to be punished, but corrected. We are all brothers, and I live
by receiving a salary for collecting the taxes from poor working
men, to be used for the luxury of the idle and the rich. We are all
brothers, and I receive a salary for preaching to people what is
supposed to be the Christian religion, in which I do not believe
myself, and which deprives them of the possibility of finding out
the real faith. I receive a salary as a priest, a bishop, for
deceiving people in what is the most important matter for them. We
are all brothers, but I give to the poor my pedagogical, medical,
literary labours for money only. We are all brothers, but I receive
a salary for preparing myself to commit murder, studying how to
kill, or making a gun, powder, fortresses.
The whole life of our higher classes is one solid contradiction,
which is the more agonizing, the more sensitive man's conscience is.
The man with a sensitive conscience cannot help but suffer, if he
lives this life. There is one means by which he can free himself
from this suffering,--it consists in drowning his conscience; but
even if such men succeed in drowning their conscience, they cannot
drown their terror.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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