Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/459

 at opposite poles, yet with unanimous heat, denied this special datum of Christ's teaching. For the first, it is impossible not to lose temper, to choke off dissidents, not to glorify the battle-field and capital punishments; for the second, it is impossible not to use violence in destroying the existing, ugly disorder which is called order. Evidently popes and authorities cannot even imagine the lives of men without violence. Exactly so it is with the revolutionists.

You know a tree by its fruits; a good tree cannot bring forth the fruits of violence. Christ's teaching cannot justify the one in choking, or the other in putting out of the way. And therefore both the one party and the other, distorting the doctrine, deprive themselves of that true force which is given by faith in the truth, in the whole truth, and not in a small fraction of it.

Those that lift the sword shall perish with the sword; this is not a prediction, but the assertion of a fact known to all. ''The lamp of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness!''

If thy light is darkness, if what you consider good is evil, the work also of thy life will be evil. It is impossible to serve God a little, the devil also a little. And the Gospel is not such a stupid book as the popes make it out for us. And each proposition is laid down in it, not idly, but so that it is organically connected with the whole teaching; thus the command as to non-resistance of evil runs through the whole of the Gospels, and without it the teaching of the Gospel, for me at least, wholly falls to the ground.

Moreover, it is expressed another time so clearly and directly that it is impossible to escape it; moreover, the whole account of Christ's life and actions is an application of this commandment; moreover in John, Caiaphas is represented as not comprehending this truth, and the consequence of not understanding this truth, under the pretext of the advantage of the people,