Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/130

106 fecund with horrors,—with the same horrors, with the same tortures,—and that these, in the eyes of succeeding generations, will seem just as marvelous in their cruelty and stupidity. The disease is the same, and the disease is not felt by those that profit by these horrors.

Let them profit for a hundred, for a thousand times more. Let them build their castles, set up their tents, give their balls, let them swindle the people. Let the Nikolaï Palkins whip the people to death, let them shut up hundreds of men secretly in fortresses; only let them do this themselves, so as not to corrupt the people, so as not to deceive them by compelling them to take part in this, as the old soldier was.

This horrible disease lies in the deception: in this fact that for a man there can be any sanctity and any law higher than the sanctity and the law of love to one's neighbor; in the deception, which conceals the fact, that, though a man in carrying out the demands of men may do many bad things, only one kind of thing he ought not to do. He ought never at any one's instigation to go against God, to kill and to torture his brethren.

Eighteen hundred years ago, to the question of the Pharisees, it was said: "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's."

If there was any faith among men and they recognized any duty to God, then above all they would recognize it as their duty before God to do what God Himself taught man when He said: "Thou shalt not kill"; when He said, "Do not unto others what you would not have others do to you"; when He said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," saying it not in words only, but writing in ineradicable marks on the heart of every man—love to one's neighbor; mercy, horror of murder and of torture of one's brethren.

If men only believed in God, then they could not help acknowledging this first obligation to Him, not to torture, not to kill, and then the words, "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things