Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/61

 44 submit, not because we know how our life will shape itself in consequence of our ceasing to obey power, but because submission to a power that demands that we should break the law of God, is a sin. This we know beyond doubt, and we also know that as a consequence of not transgressing God's will and not sinning, nothing but good can come to us or to the whole world.

People are prone to believe in the realization of the most improbable events under the sun. They believe in the possibility of flying and communicating with the planets, in the possibility of arranging Socialistic Communes, in spiritualistic communications, and in many other palpably impossible things; but they do not wish to believe that the conception of life in which they and all who surround them live, can ever be altered.

And yet such changes, even the most extraordinary, are continually taking place in ourselves, and among those around us, and among whole communities and nations; and it is these changes that constitute the essence of human life.

Not to mention changes that have happened in historic times in the social consciousness of nations, at present in Russia, before our very eyes, an apparently astonishing change is taking place with incredible rapidity in the consciousness of the whole Russian nation, of which we had no external indication two or three years ago.

The change only seems to us to have taken place suddenly, because the preparation for it, which went on in the spiritual region was not visible. A similar change is still going on in the spiritual region inaccessible to our observations. If the Russian people who two years ago thought it impossible to disobey or even to criticise the existing power, now not only criticise, but are even preparing to disobey it and to replace it by a new one, why should we not suppose that in the consciousness of the Russian people