Aylmer Maude

“ Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life; and that consequently it makes life possible.
Where there is life, there, since man began, faith has made life possible for him; and the chief outline of that faith is everywhere and always one and the same. Faith does not consist in agreeing with what some one has said, as is usually supposed; faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself, but lives. Faith is the strength of life. ”

“ Christian teaching does not lay down laws for everybody, and does not say to people, "You, all, for fear of punishment, must obey such and such rules, and then you will all be happy"; but it explains to each individual his position in relation to the world, and lets him see what results, for him individually, inevitably flow from that relation. Christianity says to man (and to each man separately) that his personal life can have no rational meaning if he counts it as belonging to himself, or as having for its aim worldly happiness for himself or for other people. ”

“ Surely if the non-Christian knows not God, nor sees life's meaning in the performance of His will, the only rule for his actions must be a reckoning, a conception, of what is more profitable for him and for all men: a continuation of the robber's life or of the child's. To decide that he needs to know what would become of the child whom he saves, and what—had he not killed him—would have been the future of the robber he kills. ”

“ As long as I was not living my own life, but was borne on the waves of some other life—as long as I believed that life had a meaning, though one I could not express—the reflection of life in poetry and art of all kinds, afforded me pleasure: it was pleasant to look at life in the mirror of art. But when I began to seek the meaning of life, and felt the necessity of living on my own account, that mirror became for me unnecessary, superfluous, ridiculous, or painful. ”

“ For man to do that which he regards as evil is not only natural, but inevitable, because, as man's life advances,—as he grows morally,—he discovers that to be evil which he used formerly to do, and he retains the habit of that evil. Man wishes to draw a straight line, but his hand trembles, and the line becomes crooked. But if a man were to say to himself, "Well, I cannot succeed with a straight line, so I will not attempt it, but will just draw where my hand leads me,"—then the result would be very dreadful. ”

“ Where, in our day, can we get such faith in the indubitability of our knowledge as would give us a right to educate people compulsorily? Take any medieval school, before or after Luther, take the whole scholastic literature of the Middle Ages, what a strength of belief and what a firm, indubitable knowledge of what was true and what was false, we see in them! It was easy for them to know that a knowledge of Greek was the one essential condition of education; for Aristotle's works were in Greek, and no one doubted the truth of his propositions till centuries later. ”

“ As a man cannot lift a mountain, and as a kindly man cannot kill an infant, so a man living the Christian life, cannot take part in deeds of violence. Of what value, then, to him are arguments about the imaginary advantages of doing what it is morally impossible for him to do ?
But how is a man to act when he sees clearly the evil of following the law of love and its corollary law of Non-resistance? How (to use the stock example) is a man to act when he sees a robber killing or outraging a child, and he can only save the child by killing the robber? ”

“ You say the Iliad is the greatest of epic works; and the historic view replies that the Iliad is merely the expression of the historic consciousness of a people at a certain historic moment. On this basis, the historic view does not dispute with you as to whether man needs freedom, or whether there is or is not a God, or whether the Iliad is good or bad: it does nothing to establish the freedom you desire; to persuade or dissuade you of the existence of a God or of the beauty of the Iliad; it merely points out to you the place your inner need or your love of truth or beauty, occupy in history. ”

“ The Free Age Press stands for an attempt to assist in spreading those deep convictions in which the noblest spirits of every age and race have united—that man's true aim and happiness is "unity in reason and love"; the realisation of the brotherhood of all men,—and that we must all strive to purge away, each from himself, those false ideas, false feelings, and false desires, personal, social, religious, political, racial, economic, which alienate us one from another and produce nine-tenths of the sum of human suffering. ”

“ You will see the mouths of mines, dug-outs into which only two men can crawl, and there you will see the Cossacks of the Black Sea Battalions, changing their boots, eating, smoking their pipes, and, in short, living. And you will see again the same stinking mud, the traces of camp life, and cast-iron refuse of every shape and form. When you have gone some three hundred steps more, you come out at another battery—a flat space with many holes, surrounded with gabions filled with earth, and cannons on platforms, and the whole walled in with earthworks. ”

“ I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge, except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing but a denial of reason, still more impossible to me than a denial of life.
Finally I saw that my mistake lay in ever expecting an examination of finite things to supply a meaning to life. The finite has no ultimate meaning apart from the infinite. The two must be linked together before an answer to life's problems can be reached.
It had only appeared to me that knowledge gave a definite answer—Schopenhauer's answer: that life has no meaning, and is an evil. ”

“ Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, is some one who amuses himself by watching how I live for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how—having now with matured mental powers reached the summit of life, from which it all lies before me, I stand on that summit—like an arch-fool—seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. ”

“ No other writer of our day could have so seized and sketched the agitated and disorderly period of youth. To those who are developed, your Youth will furnish an immense pleasure; and if any one tells you it is inferior to Childhood and Boyhood you may spit in his physiognomy. There is a world of poetry in it—all the first chapters are admirable; only the introduction is dry till one reaches the description of spring.... In many chapters one scents the poetic charm of old Moscow, which no one has yet reproduced properly. ”

“ The principal, joyous thought you have brought away is a conviction of the strength of the Russian people; and this conviction you gained, not by looking at all these traverses, breastworks, cunningly interlaced trenches, mines and cannon, one on top of another, of which you could make nothing; but from the eyes, words and actions—in short, from seeing what is called the 'spirit' of the defenders of Sevastopol.
To everything a man can do off his own bat and by his own effort, Tolstoy is keenly alive and sympathetic ”

“ I am speaking of a conception of the world which would make it unnecessary to be angry at the stupidity of mortals. Were you and I to be pounded together in a mortar and moulded into two people, we should make a capital pair. But at present you are so attached to the things of this life, that should they some day fail you, it will go hard with you; while I am so indifferent to them, that life becomes uninteresting, and I depress others by an eternal pouring 'from void into vacuum'! ”

“ A conversation about Divinity and Faith has suggested to me a great, a stupendous idea, to the realisation of which I feel myself capable of devoting my life. This idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present state of mankind: the religion of Christianity, but purged of dogmas and mysticism: a practical religion, not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth. I understand that to accomplish this the conscious labour of generations will be needed. One generation will bequeath the idea to the next, and some day fanaticism or reason will accomplish it. ”

“ Truth—in such form as you have introduced it into our literature—is something completely new among us. I do not know another writer of to-day who so compels the reader to love him and sympathise heartily with him, as he to whom I now write; and I only fear lest time, the nastiness of life, and the deafness and dumbness that surround us, should do to you what it has done to most of us, and kill the energy without which there can be no writer—none, at least, such as Russia needs. ”

“ Tolstoy's marvellous artistic power, his sincerity, and the love that is so strong a feature of his work, have often been dwelt upon; but what really gives him his supreme importance as a literary force is the union of all these things: artistic capacity, sincerity and love, with a quite extraordinary power of intellect.
It is not given to any man to solve all the problems of life; but no one has made so bold and interesting an attempt to do so as Tolstoy, or has striven so hard to make his solutions plain to every child of man. ”