Timothy M. Bondareff

“ If love reigned in the world, would twenty-four millions of men be placed under the authority of lords, as it is this day among us, and as it has been for a long time? If love reigned in the world, would the fertile earth have been given forever to sluggards, whilst men, and still worse, infants, are each day in danger of dying for want of food? ”

“ Make known these modified passages, and soon, before the close of the day, all men will be led, in spite of themselves, to love their neighbor. It is in bread, in the labor of the fields, that we must seek for the love of others. It is to demonstrate the force of this law that the laborer should direct his endeavors, if he be not also a sluggard. Idleness and luxury are, on the contrary, the principal enemies of social love. But you who have never labored, have never tasted the joys which attend the accomplishment of the law and of the labor it requires; thus you cannot believe my words. ”

“ Can we not now affirm that the second one of this trinity will truly save our souls from death? We would not commit a sin in calling it the first trinity, for that which is formed of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost is not universally accepted. One half of the world believes it, and the other half does not, making of God but one person. If all the world recognized the trinity of which I speak, which is composed of God, bread, and the laborer, they would without doubt admit that these three are contained in one God. ”

“ And now, I ask yon, which is the most useful to man and the most agreeable to God, labor or love? Labor beyond a doubt. But there is only one labor that is more useful than love, and that is the labor that is done by virtue of the commandment, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou knead bread." This is the only labor that is more useful to man and more agreeable to God than love. ”

“ Can we suppose that, having resolved to eat the bread for which he has labored with his own hands, and to live an honest life, he will retain whatever he may have acquired dishonestly? No, we cannot imagine such inconsistency.
Could a man, whose conscience is so pure, refrain from holding out a helping hand to his neighbor, or, in other words, could he behold one who is an hungered and not feed him, or one who is dying of thirst and not give him to drink, or a weary traveller and not give him rest in his own house, etc., etc.? A pure conscience has the eyes not of a man, but of an angel. ”

“ And now what do you think, readers, would happen if all the laborers understood my words? They would not fly beyond the clouds, nor hasten to seek other labors, or other virtues. By cultivating the earth, they will enrich themselves, and they will heap up gold for you also, O, ye rich ones! You cannot deny that all your joys depend on our labor: without it you could not be happy. But what will you do to restrict all these men to cultivating the earth? ”

“ By one word, one stroke of his pen, he can crush us, and he has truly crushed and annihilated us. What millions of men he has oppressed! I said but now, that, thanks to the government, idleness would flourish and increase everywhere: that labor and bread would be scorned and debased. It is done. You see now the truth of my predictions, and the exactness of my words. ”

“ The blood and the tears of men have attested the truth of all the laws, and all the commandments of the Old and the New Testament. But in favor of the primitive commandment, which is the chief of all the others, and of love to our neighbor, no one has shed one tear or one drop of blood: no one has borne witness to its truth. This is why it has been reputed as false; this is the reason that it has been unknown in the universe, and that it has now been angrily rejected. ”

“ I have found at each instant, and in all books, praises in honor of love for others. They laud it, among all people, among savages even, in all languages and dialects. They honor it in proverbs and sayings, they make it the foundation of all civil and religious law. ”

“ LABOR AND LOVE.
bondareff's will.
I.
Love of our neighbor is the principal commandment. It is the commandment of commandments, the law of laws, the virtue of virtues. There is no other virtue like it, neither in heaven nor on the earth. No other possesses the hundredth part of its perfection; and in saying this, I do not mean to depreciate existing laws and commandments, but only to give love its full value. ”

“ To-day the price of bread is fixed at one rouble and forty kopecks the measure, while its real value cannot be understood by the human mind. Once more, it must never be sold, and only in extra-ordinary cases can it be given away. Bread is estimated at one rouble and forty kopecks, and the laborer is quoted at a still lower price. He stands at zero. And yet he is one of the three persons in this one and indivisible trinity which saves us from death. ”

“ If you offend a man, you will certainly be punished. In denying the law of labor, you offend millions of men, with their children and all their descendants. Do you believe that your sin will be pardoned because of the blind fortune that protects you? ”

“ If you try to justify yourself, you will fall still more deeply into sin; if you try to contradict me, your infatuation will be an outrage, not against me, but against God, against bread, and against your conscience. ”

“ If a man passes from death to life, his neighbor will not even carry him on a cart; but if he passes from life to death, he will carry him in his arms! And if one had occasion to help a man pass from death to life, he would not do it from love for his neighbor, but only in the hope of an actual recompense, consisting of gifts of money or of public praise. ”

“ And further, the more a man is educated, the better he perceives his intellectual defects. Since, then, you look down upon the man who niurishes himself by his labor, as well as his fellow-creatures, and also the animals, what, I pray you, will you call him who, far from nourishing any one else, lives in idleness, on the labor of others, and who, as it were, turns the blood of the poor into money? ”

“ Man is too much of a hypocrite to be permitted to touch my remains. When one of us seeks in life the esteem of his neighbors, he receives but hatred; they wish him the greatest misfortunes, and they disdain him; but when he is dead and he has no longer need of man's esteem, his enemies carry him to his last resting-place with feigned sorrow. Ah! if a man could see what passes at his obsequies, he would be but little satisfied! Man is a hypocrite, I now hate all men, and that is why I will not have them touch my coffin after my death. ”

“ And now well-educated men, understanding the object I sought, say to me: "You have not labored for love of your neighbor, but for love of yourself. To love your neighbor and at the same time to love yourself is to offend God and to hate your neighbor." Their arguments seem to me pure and simple truth; one would think God had inspired their words. ”

“ For him who has not tasted the joy of labor that is accomplished conformably with the primitive law that God himself has given us when creating the heavens and the earth, it is difficult, very difficult in fact, to believe what I have been saying. ”

“ The intelligent ones have eaten it, is the reply. Can we believe an intelligent man would commit such a crime? To eat the bread of the ingnorant, to trample under foot the love of our neighbor, and the primitive law—it is almost incredible!
XXX.
Desire for food is man's strongest inclination, yet what he most disdains is labor for bread. There are actually in Russia millions of children whom they teach to read, that they may be free from this labor, and that they may eat bread for nothing; that is to say, to ride on the backs of poor laborers. ”

“ In other words, how many are there of us who labor? We are seven: myself, my wife, our oldest son and his wile, and their three young children. We are far from being all of us able to work.
Our fortune does not permit us to employ laborers; and besides that, as I have shown, we must not eat the bread of another's labor. ”

“ The supreme lawgivers, from the commencement of the world, have taken from us by fraud or by violence this precious treasure. Having stolen it, they have buried it deep in the earth, like the slothful servant in the Gospel who hid his talent. ”

“ Love is the least, and not the greatest of these virtues. If we eat without good reason the bread of others, and thus disobey the primitive law, love is then a virtue without any value. But, some readers will say, we have centred our hopes in money, as on God, believing that we will secure both temporal and eternal happiness; now this Bondareff does not esteem money, and he exacts personal labor. Must we. tell him he lies? But we cannot base our opinions on legitimate reasons. Man's inconstant fortune rests always on a tottering throne ”

“ But it is evident to any reasonable man that, without doubt, God's principal habitation is with bread and with the laborer. Suppress one of these three existences, God, or bread, or the laborer, and soon the universe will disappear. ”

“ Not content with making him submit to these wrongs, they take from him the fertile earth. They have given that forever into the hands of those who evade labor, and they call that for which they have never labored, their property. ”

“ Even as Caligula loved to drink blood, and the daughter of Darius preferred the serpent's flesh, so the child would ever like the devil's food only.
Thence, what hope can the laborers have? We still must expect the worst. But if all men learn to read and write, who will nourish them? That is an important problem that no one is willing to solve.
XXXIII.
I pray you, readers, not to forget that I speak to you humbly, [1] standing with bowed head and sad aspect at the threshold of your door. But you are occupying the place of honor at the table where they serve the products of our labor. ”

“ Theologians claim that God offered the milk of wisdom as nourishment for a child, but that the devil offered him the milk of impiety. If, by fault of the parents, the child drank the devil's milk, no other food could thenceforth please him. ”

“ When, in reading passages of Genesis to a man, you arrive at these words, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou knead bread," explain them to him by saying that this penance was decreed by God for original as well as for actual sin. Add that God, when creating heaven and earth, has not given us any other way of atoning for our sins, etc. ”

“ These are the results which the praises of love for others and the sermons in its honor produce; and if sometimes one does good to another, he is influenced by the instinct that binds us together and not by love. ”

“ But, I ask you, have these praises and sermons in honor of love for others borne any fruit, or resulted in any virtuous actions? Never! It is not only with love that we can feed the hungry, satisfy the thirsty, clothe the poor, give alms to mendicants, help the widow, or do good to the orphan, etc. ”

“ You know well, readers, that, whatever may be the subject under discussion, the rich always gain their point. It has always been so, and always will be to the end of the world, as says Sirach, the man who was inspired by God: "When a rich man speaketh, every man holdeth his tongue, and look, what he saith they extol it to the clouds: but if the poor man speak, they say. ”

“ If men would only help each other, and have compassion for the misfortunes of others; but no, they will steal, kill, burn, pillage, and deceive one another, they will detest and wish each other all manner of evil; they will set traps and snares for each other, they will commit wilful murder; and, to sum up all, if they did not fear the authorities, and if there were no sermons in the world, they would eat each other alive. ”

“ My often too eager critics do not consider private individuals for whom they care not, but they regard only the representatives of the supreme government. These arc they who are our most bitter enemies. ”

“ When the moment comes in which their fortune shall perish, my readers will say and think that the proverb is true which says: "The thunder does not always come from the clouds, but often from a heap of dust."
XXI.
Even as the universe could not live without God, it also cannot live without bread, and therefore not without laborers. It is evident that after God and bread the laborer comes in the third rank, for on this triple foundation rests all the world, as we will show clearly in the following articles. ”

“ They say there is this difference between the primitive law and later laws, that the first was given to man by God as a penance for his sins, and we know that God has not ordered us to atone for our crimes by any other virtue or merit. ”

“ But that which most oi all dries up my blood is that sixty millions of Russians are suffering in ignorance and misery because the law of labor is hidden from them. Why? That some persons may live in comfort and idleness, and enjoy all the earthly pleasures that for very shame's sake I will not enumerate before honest people. ”

“ Because the administrative authority also seeks to escape this horrible labor for bread. 2d. Because they hate us who nourish them. "Let these sixty millions of laborers suffer with hunger and cold, so long as we and ours may be happy!" And if you speak to them of love for our neighbor, they will respond by preaching philanthropy: but always in word, never in deed! ”