Leo Tolstoy

“ All eagerly follow those who are in front, and all will soon reach the point where the foremost now stand. But the foremost are standing upon the brink of an abyss. The position of the foremost is an awful one. They point out the path to those who are to follow them, and are themselves completely ignorant both of what they are doing and of the things that impel them to act as they do. ”

“ How will trade progress?’ If he is a merchant he will say, ‘What progress will civilization make, if I do not cooperate in its advancement?’ Each speaks as if the problem of his life did not lie in attaining the happiness toward which he strives, but in serving the state, commerce, or civilization. ”

“ Isn’t it as if this had been written only yesterday against those who now force men to accept their faith, and persecute and destroy all the prophets and just men, who try to bring their deception to light? ”

“ You are a believer, whatever creed you may profess. You believe in the creation of the world, in the Trinity, in the fall and the redemption of man, in the sacraments, in the efficacy of prayer, or in the Church. Christ’s doctrine does not tell you that your creed is wrong; it only gives it what is wanting. While you keep to your present creed you feel that the life of the world and your own life are full of evil, and you see no way of escape from this evil. ”

“ If you ask an average man, a representative of the great majority of the civilized men who are half believers, half unbelievers, and who are all, without a single exception, dissatisfied with their own lives and with our social adjustments, and who always foresee approaching ruin – such an average man, on being asked why he leads a life that he himself finds fault with, and why he does nothing to improve it, never gives you a direct answer and never speaks of himself, but turns the conversation to some general question about justice, trade, the state, or civilization. ”

“ Instead of answering about himself he would speak of the general state of mankind, and of the Church, as if his own life was of no importance whatever, and as if he were engrossed by the idea of saving all mankind, and especially the institution called ‘the Church.’
A philosopher, whether an idealist, a spiritualist, a pessimist, or a positivist, would answer the question of why he did not live according to his philosophical teaching by talking of the progress of mankind and of the historical law of that progress, thanks to which mankind was rapidly advancing toward perfect happiness. ”

“ But, independent of this law, which will bring good to mankind after thousands of years, is your own individual life. Now you have no rules at all for your own individual life, except those written by men whom you despise, and enforced by the police. The doctrine of Christ gives you rules that decidedly agree with your law, for your law of altruism is nothing but a bad periphrasis for the doctrine of Christ.
Or you are neither a believer nor an unbeliever, you have no time to seek the purpose of life, and you have no definite creed; it is enough for you that you act as all others do. ”

“ If you are more a believer than an unbeliever, you act according to the will of God by following the precepts of Christ; if you are more a free-thinker than a believer, by obeying Christ’s precepts you follow the most rational laws that ever existed in the world, as you will see yourself, because the precepts of Christ bear their own justification in themselves. ”

“ And it is in this way that the world, or the evil that is in the world, is overcome.
If a world of evil still exists, it exists only as something that is dead. It lives only by inertia; there is no force of life in it. It does not exist for him who believes in the commandments of Christ. It is conquered by the rational consciousness of the son of man.
‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. The victory that overcomes the world is your faith’ (1 John 5:4) .
The faith that overcomes the world is faith in the teaching of Christ. ”

“ That would not have mattered much if the men had not forgotten, in their anger against the useless helmsman, that without one they would not know in what direction they were going. So it was with our Christian world. The Church does not stand at the helm any more; we row rapidly on, and all the progress of knowledge on which our nineteenth century prides itself is only the result of our floating without a helmsman. We do not know where we are going. We go on leading our present lives absolutely without knowing why we do so. ”

“ The unthoughtful Christian now solves these questions in this way: soldiery, war, courts of law, and executions exist according to the commandments of God, transmitted to us by the Church. The Church teaches that the world, as we know it, is a lost world. All the evil that fills it exists only by the will of God as a punishment for the sins of men, and therefore we must submit to it. We can only save our souls by faith, by the sacraments, by prayer, and by submission to the will of God. ”

“ The Church teaches us that each must submit to the sovereign, who is the anointed of God, and to those who are in authority over us; that each must defend his own property by violence, make war, and execute or be executed according to the will of the authorities placed over him by God. It does not matter if this explanation good or bad, it formerly explained all the various phases of life to the believing Christian, and man did not renounce his own reason while living according to the law that he acknowledged as divine. ”

“ Murder is not unlawful, when it is our duty to take away a man’s life; for instance: When we punish a criminal by death. When we kill the enemies in fighting for our sovereign and our native land. And further on:
What other instances can you cite of murder? When a man harbors a murderer or sets him free. And that is published in hundreds and thousands of copies, and instilled into the Russians by violence, by threats and fear of punishment, under the pretence of its being the Christian doctrine. ”

“ In all that really enters into the life of man – for instance, how he is to live, is he to commit murder or not, is he to condemn his fellow-creatures or not, in what way he is to bring up his children – men submit without a murmur to the rule of others who know no more than they do themselves why they themselves live as they do, and why they insist upon others living the same way. ”

“ Ask the men of our day, whether they are believers or unbelievers, what doctrine they follow. They will be obliged to confess that they follow only the laws written by the officials of the Second Section, or by the Legislative Assembly, and put in practice by the police. This is the only teaching that our European world acknowledges. They know that this teaching does not come either from heaven or from the prophets, neither was it taught by the sages. ”

“ The idea never occurs to them that they must live in some way or other, that they do live in some way or other, and that it is exactly the principle on which their lives are based that is their religion. These men imagine that they have very elevated convictions and no faith. But, whatever they may say, they have faith if they accomplish any rational work, because rational work is always the result of faith. ”

“ While I write, a chill creeps over me at my daring to say what I must say – that we have no right to annihilate the commandments of God, which are written in all His laws and in all our hearts, by adding such words as ‘duty,’ ‘our sovereign,’ ‘our father-land,’ etc., which explain nothing.
Yes, what Christ warned us against has come to pass, for He said (Luke 11:33-36, and Matt. 6:23) , ‘Take heed that the light that is in you is not darkened. If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’
The light that is in us has indeed become darkness ”

“ But all notions of there being a law that is indubitably rational and that each feels in his inmost soul to be obligatory are so lost in our world that the existence of a law among the Hebrews, which defined the whole order of life, for them, a law that was rendered obligatory by the moral feeling of each, is considered as existing exclusively among the Hebrews. ”

“ Then Christ’s doctrine says in effect to you, you are unable to verify the truth of the doctrine that is preached to you – you find it easier to follow the example of those around you; but, however humble you may be in mind, you have a judge in your heart who sometimes makes you feel that you have acted rightly, and at other times shows you that you are wrong. ”

“ However modest your lot may be, you cannot help sometimes asking yourself, ‘Ought I to act as all around me do, or according to my own feeling?’ And no sooner does the question arise in your mind than the precepts of Christ are found to answer both your reason and your conscience. ”

“ The doctrine of Christ does not disagree with men in respect to their view of life, but, including it, gives them what is wanting in it, what is indispensable. It points out to them a path that is not a new one, but one familiar to them from their childhood. ”

“ The average man answers exactly as the believer and philosopher do. He answers a personal question by a general one; and the reason why the believer, the philosopher, and the average man retort by a general question is that not one of them has any true notion of life. ”

“ The result of all this is that, in our century, we see wise and learned men who are ‘naively’ convinced that they are devoid of all religion, only because they do not acknowledge the correctness of those metaphysical explanations that were, in some past time, given as explanations of life. ”

“ If men did nothing themselves, but were placed in the position they occupy by some outward power, then they might answer the question, ‘Why are you in such a position?’ by saying that they did not know why. ”

“ Learned men, such as Tillet, Spenser, and others, argue very seriously about ‘religion,’ understanding by the word the metaphysical teaching of the ‘origin of all,’ without suspecting that, instead of speaking of religion as a whole, they speak of only a part of it. ”

“ Christ teaches men to place this light of reason above all else, to live up to it, and not to do what they themselves acknowledge to be irrational. If you consider it irrational to kill Turks or Germans, do not do so; if you consider it irrational to force poor creatures to work hard, in order that you may wear fine hats or have fine drawing rooms, do not do so ”

“ A criminal is put to death in order to put a stop to the evil that he does. Enemies are killed in the war in which we fight for our sovereign and our country.’ These are the only words that explain why this commandment is repealed. ”

“ There is not one man among them who could now answer the direct question, “Why do you lead the life that you lead?’ ‘Why do you do what you do?’ I have addressed such questions to hundreds of men, and have never received a direct reply. ”

“ But men make their own positions for themselves, for each other, and especially for their children, and they must therefore be able to answer when asked why they assemble into armies, to cripple and to kill each other ”

“ Even if all this were pleasant, men should be able to give their reasons; but when it is the hardest possible work, when men groan over it, how can they go on acting in this way without trying to find adequate reasons. Men never have lived without trying to solve these questions; men cannot live without making the attempt. ”

“ I cite from the 64th edition of the catechism published in 1880. Twenty years have gone by since slavery has been abolished, and no one has taken the trouble to remove the sentence that was added to the commandment, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ in order to uphold and justify slavery.
With regard to the sixth commandment, ‘You shall not kill,’ men are taught from the very first lines to kill.
What does the sixth commandment forbid? Murder; or taking away our neighbor’s life in any way. Is taking a man’s life always illegal murder? ”

“ But in your calmer moments do not act as you do now, do not organize your life in a way that renders it difficult to avoid anger and adultery, to abstain from swearing and using violence or making war ”