Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/67

 50 long as we admit as necessary and lawful, governmental violence demanding what is contrary to God's law, and involving the acceptance of what is criminal and bad, in place of what is lawful and good.

Why should we not imagine that, through suffering, men may be aroused from the suggestion, the hypnotism, under which they have suffered so long, and remember that they are all sons and servants of God, and therefore can and must submit only to Him and to their own consciences? All this is not difficult to imagine; it is even difficult to imagine that it should not be accomplished.

"Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven," does not refer to individuals only, but also to human societies, As a man, having experienced all the miseries caused by the passions and temptations of life, consciously returns to a state of simplicity, kindness towards all, and readiness to accept what is good (the state in which children unconsciously live) and returns to it with the wealth of experience and the reason of a grown-up man, so human society also, having experienced all the miserable consequences of abandoning the law of God to obey human power, and of attempting to arrange life apart from agricultural labour, must now consciously return, with all the wealth of experience gained during the time of its aberration, from the snares of human power, and from the attempt to organise life on a basis of industrial activity, and must submit to the highest, Divine law, and to the primary work of cultivating the soil, which it had temporarily abandoned.

Consciously to return from the snares of human power, and to obey the supreme law of God along, is to admit as always and everywhere binding upon us, the eternal law of God, which is alike in all teachings: Brahminist, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoian