Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 09 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/279

Rh to kill Turks or Germans, do not go; if you consider it contrary to reason to make use of the labor of poor men that you and yours may wear "cylinder" hats and lace yourselves in corsets or live in the height of fashion and maintain a salon, to be a burden to you, why, don't do so; if you consider it contrary to reason to take people already corrupted by idleness and dangerous companionship and shut them up in prison, in other words, in absolute idleness and the most dangerous companionship, do not do so; if you consider it contrary to reason to live in the pestilential air of cities when you can live in a purer atmosphere, if you consider it contrary to reason to teach your children before all and above all the grammatical laws of dead languages, do not do so. Do not do what our whole European world is doing at the present time,—living, and yet not considering its life reasonable; acting, and yet not considering its acts reasonable; but having no confidence in reason, and living in opposition to it.

Christ's teaching is the light. The light shines, and the darkness cannot compass it. Men cannot refuse to accept the light when it shines. They cannot quarrel about it, they cannot help agreeing with it. They must agree with Christ's teaching because it encircles, without coming into collision with, all the errors in which men live, and, like the ether which the physicists tells us about, permeates all things. Christ's teaching is inevitable for every man of our world in whatever situation he may be found. Men cannot help accepting Christ's teaching, not because it is impossible to deny the metaphysical explanation of life which it gives (everything may be denied), but because it alone offers rules for the conduct of life without which humanity has never lived, and never will be able to live ; without which no human being has lived or can live, if he would live as man should live,—a reasonable life.

The power of Christ's teaching is not in its explanation of the meaning of life, but in what is deduced from it—in its teaching of life. Christ's metaphysical doctrine is not new; it is that eternal doctrine of humanity inscribed in