Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1908
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
‘When among one hundred men, one rules over ninety-nine, it is unjust, it is a despotism; when ten rule over ninety, it is equally unjust, it is an oligarchy; but when fifty-one rule over forty-nine (and this is only theoretical, for in reality it is always ten or eleven of these fifty-one), it is entirely just, it is freedom!
Could there be anything funnier, in its manifest absurdity, than such reasoning? And yet it is this very reasoning that serves as the basis for all reformers of the political structure.’
‘The nations of the earth are trembling and shaking. Everywhere one feels some kind of active force that seems to be preparing for an earthquake. Never before has man held so great a responsibility. At each moment he undertakes more and more important tasks. There is a feeling that something great is about to happen. Before Christ’s appearance the world was awaiting a great event, but nevertheless failed to accept Him when He arrived. Likewise nowadays the world might experience the birth pangs before His second coming and fail to understand what is happening.’ (Lucie Mallory)
‘And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body.’ (Matt. X, 28)
Today the States of the Christian world have not only reached but have surpassed the limit which the States of the ancient world attained before their downfall. This can be seen particularly clearly because in our times every step forward in technical progress not only fails to advance the common well-being but, on the contrary, shows with increasing clarity that all this progress can only increase people’s misery and can in no way diminish it. Yet other new devices might be invented for transporting people from one place to another, submarine, subterranean, aerial and spatial, as well as new methods of disseminating speech and thought; but, since the people traveling from one place to another are neither willing nor able to commit anything but evil, the thoughts and words being spread will incite men to nothing but evil. As for the increasingly perfected means of exterminating one another, means which increase the possibility of slaughter without putting the user at risk, they only point more clearly to the impossibility of the Christian nations continuing their activities in the present direction.
Life among the Christian nations is now dreadful, particularly on account of the absence of any kind of unifying moral principle, and the irrationality which, despite all the intellectual advances, degrades them to a moral plane beneath the animals; and, more especially, on account of the complexity of the established lie which hides people from the misery and cruelty of their lives.
The lie supports the cruelty in life, the cruelty demands more and more lies and, like snowballs, they both grow without restraint. But there is an end to everything. And I believe that the end to this calamitous situation of the nations of the Christian world has now come.
The position of the people of Christendom is dreadful, but at the same time it is something that had to happen and could not but have happened, and which must inevitably lead these nations to salvation. The sufferings experienced by the people of the Christian world result from the lack of a religious outlook pertinent to our times and are the inevitable conditions of growth which must lead to people adopting a religious attitude that does correspond to the age.
The world outlook relevant to our times is the understanding of the meaning of life and resulting guidance for conduct that was revealed in its true meaning in the Christian doctrines nineteen hundred years ago, but which has been concealed from men by the artificial and false distortions made by the Church.