And therefore men are in a threefold relation to truth. Some truths have been so assimilated by them that they have become the unconscious basis of action, others are only just on the point of being revealed to him, and a third class, though not yet assimilated by him, have been revealed to him with sufficient clearness to force him to decide either to recognize them or to refuse to recognize them.
These, then, are the truths which man is free to recog- nize or to refuse to recognize.
C^he liberty of man does not consist in the power of act- ing independently of the progress of life and the influences arising from it, but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth revealed to him, and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world; or on the other hand for refusing to recognize the truth, and so being a miser- IS WITHIN Your 355 able and reluctant slave dragged whither he has no desire to go.
(Truth not only points out the way along which human life ought to move, but reveals also the only way along which it can move. And therefore all men must willingly or unwillingly move along the way of truth, some spon- taneously accomplishing the task set them in life, others submitting involuntarily to the law of life. Man's freedom lies in the power of this choice/^ This freedom within these narrow limits seems so insignificant to men that they do not notice it. Some — the determinists — consider this amount of freedom so trifling that they do not recognize it at all. Others — the champions of complete free will — keep their eyes fixed on their hypothetical free will and neglect this which seemed to them such a trivial degree of freedom.
This freedom, confined between the limits of complete ignorance of the truth and a recognition of a part of the truth, seems hardly freedom at all, especially since, whether a man is willing or unwilling to recognize the truth revealed to him, he will be inevitably forced to carry it out in life.
A horse harnessed with others to a cart is riot free to refrain from moving the cart. If he does not move for- ward the cart will knock him down and go on dragging him with it, whether he will or not. But the horse is free to drag the cart himself or to be dragged with it. And so it is with man.
^OVhether this is a great or small degree of freedom in com- parison with the fantastic liberty we should like to have, it is the only freedom that really exists, and in it consists the only happiness attainable by man.
^^nd more than that, this freedom is the sole means of accomplishing the divine work of the life of the world. ) According to Christ's doctrine, the man who sees the sig- 35^ *' THE KINGDOM OF GOD nificance of life in the domain in which it is not free, in the domain of effects, that is, of acts, has not the true life. According to the Christian doctrine, that man is living in the truth who has transported his life to the domain in which it is free — the domain of causes, that is, the knowl- edge and recognition^ the profession and realization in life of revealed truth. " PDevoting his life to works of the flesh, a man busies him- self with actions depending on temporary causes outside himself. He himself does nothing really, he merely seems to be doing something. In reality all the acts which seem to be his are the work of a higher power, and he is not the creator of his own life, but the slave of it. Devoting his life to the recognition and fulfillment of the truth revealed to him, he identifies himself with the source of universal life and accomplishes acts not personal, and dependent on con- ditions of space and time, but acts unconditioned by pre- vious causes, acts which constitute the causes of everything else, and have an infinite, unlimited significance. .**The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the vio- lent take it by force." (Matt. xi. 12.)
It is this violent effort to rise above external conditions .- to the recognition and realization of truth by w^hich the I kingdom of heaven is taken, and it is this effort of violence \which must and can be made in our times. ^Men need only understand this, they need only cease to trouble themselves about the general external conditions in which they are not free, and devote one-hundredth part of the energy they waste on those material things to that in which they are free, to the recognition and realization of the truth which is before them, and to the liberation of them- selves and others from deception and hypocrisy, and, with- out effort or conflict, there would be an end at once of the false organization of life which makes men miserable, and threatens them with worse calamities in the future. And IS WITHIN Your 357 then the kingdom of God would be realized, or at least that first stage of it for which men are ready now by the degree of development of their conscience./ Just as a single shock may be sufficient, when a liquid is saturated with some salt, to precipitate it at once in crystals, a slight effort may be perhaps all that is needed now that the truth already revealed to men may gain a mastery over hundreds, thousands, millions of men, that a public opinion consistent with conscience may be established, and through this change of public opinion the whole order of life may be transformed. /And it depends upon us to make this effort."
^^t each of us only try to understand and accept the Christian truth which in the most varied forms surrounds us on all sides and forces itself upon us; let us only cease from lying and pretending that we do not see this truth or wish to realize it, at least in what it demands from us above all else; only let us accept and boldly profess the truth to which we are called, and we should find at once that hun- dreds, thousands, millions of men are in the same position as we, that they see the truth as we do, and dread as we do to stand alone in recognizing it, and like us are only wait- ing for others to recognize it also.^ £Only let men cease to be hypocrites, and they would at once see that this cruel social organization, which holds them in bondage, and is represented to them as something stable, necessary, and ordained of God, is already tottering and is only propped up by the falsehood of hypocrisy, with which we, and others like us, support it.)
But if this is so, if it is true that it depends on us to break down the existing organization of life, have we the right to destroy it, without knowing clearly what we shall set up in its place? What will become of human society when the existing order of things is at an end?
**What shall we find the other side of the walls of the world we are abandoning?
35^ '' THE KINGDOM OF GOD **Fear will come upon us — a void, a vast emptiness, free- dom— how are we to go forward not knowing whither, how face loss, not seeing hope of gain?...If Columbus had reasoned thus he would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set off upon the ocean, not knowing the route, on the ocean on which no one had sailed, to sail toward a land whose existence was doubtful. By this madness he discovered a new world. Doubtless if the peoples of the world could simply transfer themselves from one furnished mansion to another and better one — it would make it much easier; but unluckily there is no one to get humanity's new dwelling ready for it. The future is even worse than the ocean — there is nothing there — it will be what men and cir- cumstances make it.
* *If you are content with the old world, try to preserve it, it is very sick and cannot hold out much longer. iBut if you cannot bear to live in everlasting dissonance between your beliefs and your life, thinking one thing and doing another, get out of the mediaeval whited sepulchers, and face your fears. I know very well it is not easy.*) **It is not a little thing to cut one's self off from all to which a man has been accustomed from his birth, with which he has grown up to maturity. Men are ready for tremendous sacrifices,, but not for those which life demands of them. Are they ready to sacrifice modern civilization, their manner of life, their religion, the received conventional morality?
* * Are we ready to give up all the results we have attained with such effort, results of which we have been boasting for three centuries; to give up every convenience and charm of our existence, to prefer savage youth to the senile decay of civilization, to pull down the palace raised for us by our ancestors only for the pleasure of having a hand in the founding of a new house, which will doubtless be built long after we are gone?" (Herzen, vol, v. p. 55.)
IS WITHIN Your 359 Thus wrote almost half a century ago the Russian writer, who with prophetic insight saw clearly then, what even the most unreflecting man sees to-day, the impossibility, that is, of life continuing on its old basis, and the necessity of establishing new forms of life.
It is clear now from the very simplest, most commonplace point of view, that it is madness to remain under the roof of a building which cannot support its weight, and that we must leave it. / And indeed it is difficult to imagine a posi- tion more wretched than that of the Christian world to-day, with its nations armed against one another, with its con- stantly increasing taxation to maintain its armies, with the hatred of the working class for the rich ever growing more intense, with the Damocles sword of war forever hanging over the heads of all, ready every instant to fall, certain to fall sooner or later.)
(Hardly could any revolution be more disastrous for the great mass of the population than the present order or rather disorder of our life, with its daily sacrifices to exhausting and unnatural toil, to poverty, drunkenness, and profligacy, with all the horrors of the war that is at hand, which will swallow up in one year more victims than all the revolutions of the century./ What will become of humanity if each of us performs the duty God demands of us through the conscience implanted within us? Will not harm come if, being wholly in the power of a master, I carry out, in the workshop erected and directed by him, the orders he gives me, strange though they may seem to me who do not know the Master's final aims?
But it is not even this question **What will happen?" that agitates men when they hesitate to fulfill the Master's will. They are troubled by the question how to live with- out those habitual conditions of life which we call civiliza- tion, culture, art, and science. We feel ourselves all the 360 '' THE KINGDOM OF GOD burdensomeness of life as it is; we see also that this organi- zation of life must inevitably be our ruin, if it continues. At the same time we want the conditions of our life which arise out of this organization — our civilization, culture, art, and science — to remain intact. It is as though a man, liv- ing in an old house and suffering from cold and all sorts of inconvenience in it, knowing, too, that it is on the point of falling to pieces, should consent to its being rebuilt, but only on the condition that he should not be required to leave it: a condition which is equivalent to refusing to have it rebuilt at all.
**But what if I leave the house and give up every con- venience for a time, and the new house is not built, or is built on a different plan so that I do not find in it the com- forts to which I am accustomed?** But seeing that the materials and the builders are here, there is every likelihood that the new house will on the contrary be better built than the old one. And at the same time, there is not only the likelihood but the certainty that the old house will fall down and crush those who remain within it. Whether the old habitual conditions of life are supported, or whether they are abolished and altogether new and better conditions arise; in any case, there is no doubt we shall be forced to leave the old forms of life which have become impossible and fatal, and must go forward to meet the future. ''Civilization, art, science, culture, will disappear!" Yes, but all these we know are only various manifesta- tions of truth, and the change that is before us is only to be made for the sake of a closer attainment and realization of truth. How then can the manifestations of truth disap- pear through our realizing it? These manifestations will be different, higher, better, but they will not cease to be."^ Only what is false in them will be destroyed; all the rruth there was in them will only be stronger and more flour- ishing.
IS WITHIN Your 361 (Take thought, oh, men, and have faith in the Gospel, in whose teaching is your happiness. If you do not take thought, you will perish just as the men perished, slain by Pilate, or crushed by the tower of Siloam; as millions of men have perished, slayers and slain, executing and exe- cuted, torturers and tortured alike, and as the man foolishly perished, who filled his granaries full and made ready for a long life and died the very night that he planned to begin his life. Take thought and have faith in the Gospel, Christ said eighteen hundred years ago, and he says it with even greater force now that the calamities foretold by him have come to pass, and the senselessness of our life has reached the furthest point of suffering and madnessJ^ Nowadays, after so many centuries of fruitless efforts to make our life secure by the pagan organization of life, it must be evident to everyone that all efforts in that direction only introduce fresh dangers into personal and social life, and do not render it more secure in any way. ^Whatever names we dignify ourselves with, whatever uni- forms we wear, whatever priests we anoint ourselves before, however many millions we possess, however many guards are stationed along our road, however many police- men guard our wealth, however many so-called criminals, revolutionists, and anarchists we punish, whatever exploits we have performed, whatever states we may have founded, fortresses and towers we may have erected — from Babel to the Eiffel Tower — there are two inevitable conditions of life, confronting all of us, which destroy its whole meaning; (i) death, which may at any moment pounce upon each of us; and (2) the transitoriness of all our works, which so soon pass away and leave no trace. 7" Whatever we may do — found companies, build palace^ and monuments, write songs and poems — it is all not for long time. Soon it passes away, leaving no trace. / And therefore, however we may conceal it from ourselves, we cannot help seeing that the 362 '» THE KINGDOM OF GOD significance of our life cannot lie in our personal fleshly existence, the prey of incurable suffering and inevitable death, nor in any social institution or organization. Who- ever you may be who are reading these lines, think of your position and of your duties — not of your position as land- owner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, soldier, which has been temporarily allotted you by men, and not of the imaginary duties laid on you by those positions, but of your real positions in eternity as a creature who at the will of Someone has been called out of uncon- sciousness after an eternity of non-existence to which you may return at any moment at his will. Think of your duties — not your supposed duties as a landowner to your estate, as a merchant to your business, as emperor, minis- ter, or official to the state, but of your real duties, the duties that follow from your real position as a being called into life and endowed with reason and love.*^ Are you doing what he demands of you wlio has sent you into the world, and to whom you will soon return? Are you doing what he wills? Are you doing his will, when as landowner or manufacturer you rob the poor of the fruits of their toil, basing your life on this plunder of the workers, or when, as judge or governor, you ill treat men, sentence them to execution, or when as soldiers you prepare for war, kill and plunder?
You will say that the world is so made that this is inevi- table, and that you do not do this of your own free will, but because you are forced to do so. But can it be that you have such a strong aversion to men's sufferings, ill treat- ment, and murder, that you have such an intense need of love and co-operation with your fellows that you see clearly that only by the recognition of the equality of all, and by mutual services, can the greatest possible happiness be real- ized; that your head and your heart, the faith you profess, and even science itself tell you the same thing, and yet that IS WITHIN Your 363 IS WITHIN Your 363 in spite of it all you can be forced by some confused and complicated reasoning to act in direct opposition to all this; that as landowner or capitalist you are bound to base your whole life on the oppression of the people; that as emperor or president you are to command armies, that is, to be the head and commander of murderers; or that as government official you are forced to take from the poor their last pence for rich men to profit and share them among themselves; or that as judge or juryman you could be forced to sentence erring men to ill treatment and death because the truth was not revealed to them, or above all, for that is the basis of all the evil, that you could be forced to become a soldier, and renouncing your free will and your human sentiments, could undertake to kill anyone at the command of other men? ^ .It cannot be. C^Even if you are told that all this is necessary for the maintenance of the existing order of things, and that this social order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and wars is necessary to society; that still greater disasters would ensue if this organization were destroyed; all that is said only by those who profit by this organiza- tion, while those who suffer from it — and they are ten times as numerous — think and say quite the contrary. And at the bottom of your heart you know yourself that it is not true, that the existing oragnization has outlived its time, and must inevitably be reconstructed on new principles, and that consequently there is no obligation upon you to sacrifice your sentiments of humanity to support it.
TAbove all, even if you allow that this organization is necessary, why do you believe it to be your duty to maintain it at the cost of your best feelings? Who has made you the nurse in charge of this sick and moribund organization? Not society nor the state nor anyone; no one has asked you to undertake this; you who fill your position of land- 364 *' THE KINGDOM OF GOD owner, merchant, tzar, priest, or soldier know very well that you occupy that position by no means with the unselfish aim of maintainhig the organization of life necessary to men's happiness, but simply in your own interests, to satisfy your own covetousness or vanity or ambition or indolence or cowardice. If you did not desire that position, you would not be doing your utmost to retain it. Try the ex- periment of ceasing to commit the cruel, treacherous, and base actions that you are constantly committing in order to retain your position, and you will lose it at once. Try the simple experiment, as a government official, of giving up lying, and refusing to take a part in executions and acts of violence; as a priest, of giving up deception; as a soldier, of giving up murder; as landowner or manufacturer, of giv- ing up defending your property by fraud and force; and you will at once lose the position which you pretend is forced upon you, and which seems burdensome to you.
A man cannot be placed against his will in a situation opposed to his conscience.
If you find yourself in such a position it is not because it is necessary to anyone whatever, but simply because you wish it. And therefore knowing that your position is re- pugnant to your heart and your head, and to your faith, and even to the science in which you believe, you cannot help reflecting upon the question whether in retaining it, and above all trying to justify it, you are doing what you ought to do.
You might risk making a mistake if you had time to see and retrieve your fault, and if you ran the risk for some- thing of some value. But when you know beyond all doubt that you may disappear any minute, without the least possi- bility either for yourself or those you draw after you into your error, of retrieving the mistake, when you know that whatever you may do in the external organization of life it will all disappear as quickly and surely as you will yourself, \ /S WITHIN VOUr 365 and will leave no trace behind, it is clear that you have no reasonable ground for running the risk of such a fearful mistake.
It would be perfectly simple and clear if you did not by your hypocrisy disguise the truth which has so unmistakably been revealed to us.
r^^hare all that you have with others, do not heap up riches, do not steal, do not cause suffering, do not kill, do not unto others what you would not they should do unto you, all that has been said not eighteen hundred, but five thousand years ago, and there could be no doubt of the truth of this law if it were not for hypocrisy. Except for hypoc- risy men could not have failed, if not to put the law in prac- tice, at least to recognize it, and admit that it is wrong not to put it in practice.7 But you will say that there is the public good to be con- sidered, and that on that account one must not and ought not to conform to these principles; for the public good one may commit acts of violence and murder. It is better for one man to die than that the whole people perish, you will say like Caiaphas, and you sign the sentence of death of one man, of a second, and a third; you load your gun against this man who is to perish for the public good, you imprison him, you take his possessions. You say that you commit these acts of cruelty because you are a part of the society and of the state; that it is your duty to serve them, and as landowner, judge, emperor, or soldier to conform to their laws. But besides belonging to the state and having duties created by that position, you belong also to eternity and to God, who also lays duties upon you. And just as your duties to your family and to society are subordinate to your superior duties to the state, in the same way the latter must necessarily be subordinated to the duties dictated to you by the eternal life and by God. And just as it would be senseless to pull up the telegraph posts for fuel for a 366 *' THE KINGDOM OF GOD family or society and thus to increase its welfare at the expense of public interests, in the same way it is senseless to do violence, to execute, and to murder to increase the welfare of the nation, because that is at the expense of the interests of humanity.
Your duties as a citizen cannot but be subordinated to the superior obligations of the eternal life of God, and can- not be in opposition to them. As Christ's disciples said eighteen centuries ago: ** Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye*' (Acts iv. 19); and, **We ought to obey God rather than It is asserted that, in order that the unstable order of things, established in one corner of the world for a few men, may not be destroyed, you ought to commit acts of violence which destroy the eternal and immutable order established by God and by reason. Can that possibly be?
And therefore you cannot but reflect on your position as landowner, manufacturer, judge, emperor, president, minis- ter, priest, and soldier, which is bound up with violence, deception, and murder, and recognize its unlawfulness.
I do not say that if you are a landowner you are bound to give up your lands immediately to the poor; if a capital- ist or manufacturer, your money to your workpeople; or that if you are Tzar, minister, official, judge, or general, you are bound to renounce immediately the advantages of your position; or if a soldier, on whom all the system of violence is based, to refuse immediately to obey in spite of all the dangers of insubordination.
If you do so, you will be doing the best thing possible. But it may happen, and it is most likely, that you will not have the strength to do so. You have relations, a family, subordinates and superiors; you are under an influence so powerful that you cannot shake it off; but you. can always recognize the truth and refuse to tell a lie about it. You IS WITHIN Your 367 IS WITHIN Your 367 need not declare that you are remaining a landowner, manu- facturer, merchant, artist, or writer because it is useful to mankind; that you are governor, prosecutor, or tzar, not because it is agreeable to you, because you are used to it, but for the public good; that you continue to be a soldier, not from fear of punishment, but because you consider the army necessary to society. You can always avoid lying in this way to yourself and to others, and you ought to do so; because the one aim of your life ought to be to purify your- self from falsehood and to confess the truth. And you need only do that and your situation will chan'ge directly of itself.
ClThere is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth. "" And yet simply from the fact that other men as misguided and as pitiful creatures as yourself have made you soldier, tzar, landowner, capitalist, priest, or general, you under- take to commit acts of violence obviously opposed to your reason and your heart, to base your existence on the misfor- tunes of others, and above all, instead of filling the one duty of your life, recognizing and professing the truth, you feign not to recognize it and disguise it from yourself and others.
And what are the conditions in which you are doing this? You who may die any instant, you sign sentences of death, you declare war, you take part iait, you judge, you punish, you plunder the working people, you live luxuriously in the midst of the poor, and teach weak men who have confidence in you that this must be so, that the duty of men is to do this, and yet it may happen at the moment when you are acting thus that a bacterium or a bull may attack you and you will fall and die, losing forever the chance of repairing the harm you have done to others, and above all to yourself, in uselessly wasting a life which has been given you only 368 '* THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU:* once in eternity, without having accomplished the only thing you ought to have done.)
/^However commonplace and out of date it may seem to us, however confused we may be by hypocrisy and by the hypnotic suggestion which results from it, nothing can destroy the certainty of this simple and clearly defined truth. No external conditions can guarantee our life, which is attended with inevitable sufferings and infallibly terminated by death, and which consequently can have no significance except in the constant accomplishment of what is demanded by the Power which has placed us in life with a sole certain guide — the rational conscience. ^ That is why that Power cannot require of us what is irra- tional and impossible: the organization of our temporary external life, the life of society or of the state. VThat Power demands of us only what is reasonable, certain, and possi- ble: to serve the kingdom of God, that is, to contribute to the establishment of the greatest possible union between all living beings — a union possible only in the truth; and to recognize and, to profess the revealed truth, which is always in our power. /